K-6 Schools and the Active Shooter: Teachers’ Perceptions of Security Implementations

Abstract

Every year, school associated violent deaths occur in the United States of America. This leads to an environment of fear and insecurity within schools. Notable examples of this violence included shootings at schools such as Columbine and Sandy Hook, which were well publicized events that led to public demands for changes in the law regarding safety within schools. The current qualitative case study did not put forward any hypotheses but did attempt to gauge the perspectives of schoolteachers regarding the impact of security measures in a New Jersey K-6 school district. The study also attempted to gauge to what degree threats to safety impacted safety perceptions within the schools. To address these research questions, the qualitativecase study method was deemed the best approach to the study, since it allowed the researcher to explore perceptions of these phenomena from the perspectives of the teachers themselves who were working in these schools.