Parents’ fears about sending children to school are highest in two decades, poll finds
Parents are growing more worried about their children’s physical safety at school in the United States, a new poll shows.
When asked, “thinking about your oldest child, when he or she is at school, do you fear for his or her physical safety,” 44% of adults surveyed answered yes, according to the Gallup poll released Sept. 1. That’s a 10 percentage-point increase from the last time the question was asked in 2019.
The poll’s most-recent results mark a two-decade high, with the highest percentage of parents expressing worries since 2001, when 45% of respondents answered yes to the physical safety question. According to Gallup’s data, parental fear was at its highest in 1999 with 55% of respondents saying they feared for their child’s safety at school.
Although the poll does not explicitly ask about gun violence, each uptick in parental worry aligns with a mass shooting event, Gallup says.
In 1999, shortly before the highest percentage of parents responded that they worried for their child’s safety, 13 people — 12 students and one teacher — were killed at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Similar spikes in fear followed a shooting at Santana High School in Santee, California, in 2001. This year’s results come after several mass shootings, including at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
Students have also expressed concerns about school safety, the poll shows.
One in five parents of students in grades kindergarten through 12th grade answered yes when asked if their children “expressed any worry or concern about feeling unsafe at their school when they go back to school this fall,” according to the data.
This figure ties as the second-highest percentage with the 2018 poll’s findings, and it falls just short of 2001’s 22% record high, the poll says.
Similar to parental worries, student fears appear to be influenced by gun violence in schools.
For example, 2001’s high followed the Santana High School shooting while 2018’s results came after school shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas.
Gallup says it conducted the poll Aug. 1-23 in phone interviews with a random sample of 1,006 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The survey’s margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points. The survey used a sample of 206 parents with children in kindergarten through 12th grade, and those results have a margin of error of plus or minus 8 percentage points.
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