Which Schools Do Families Avoid, and After Which Shootings? Evidence from US School Shootings, 1999–2024

Which Schools Do Families Avoid, and After Which Shootings? Evidence from US School Shootings, 1999–2024

Applied Microeconomics; Economics of Education

08/10/2026

Xavier Fletcher

Since 1999, there have been more than 400 shootings on US school campuses, harming the mental health and schooling of children up to five miles away. Public schooling carries no price and is assigned by residence, so families can avoid a school only by moving house or paying for a private one. Enrolment therefore reveals whether families avoid only the attacked school or every school the harm reaches, and how serious a shooting must be before they act. I combine these shootings with a national panel of public school enrolment from 1999 to 2024, and use a stacked difference-in-differences design to find that the attacked school loses on net roughly 1.5–2% of its continuing students, or 14 to 20 pupils, in the first year after a shooting. Schools within five miles lose at most half as much, and families choosing a school anew, who face no disruption from switching, show no avoidance of them, which I interpret as families attaching the disamenity of a shooting to the school rather than to its neighbourhood. Before the pandemic only fatal shootings were followed by avoidance, but since 2021 non-fatal shootings have been too. Because this avoidance concentrates on the attacked school, I argue that its disamenity falls on the families least able to leave.

School Shootings, Economics of Education, Applied Microeconomics