^{The Bottom Line} Students in Unsafe Schools Must Have Another Option

The Trump Administration continues to take decisive action to address the national K-12 public education crisis, ensuring a change of course from the dire status quo.

The latest action occurred on May 7^th when the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education sent a letter to all state education chiefs, which opened by stating: “Parents should never worry about their child’s safety at school.” Continuing the letter read: “All children deserve to attend a safe school in which they can focus on mastering the literacy, mathematics, and other skills necessary for success in school and beyond.”

Yet, violence has become commonplace in American public schools. For example, during the 2021-2022 school year, schools reported roughly 1.2 million violent offenses to the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection of a total nationwide enrollment of less than 49.4 million students. This only includes the reported violent offenses, not the countless other incidents that aren’t labeled violent or aren’t reported.

Despite this alarming number of violent offenses, no primary or secondary public schools in our country were considered persistently dangerous that same school year. The following school year, 2022-2023, only four schools in the nation were determined to be persistently dangerous.

This should be extremely concerning because schools with violent offenses are not safe for students, nor conducive to an effective academic learning environment.

Each state is responsible for creating a statewide policy that denotes the conditions and factors that deem a school persistently dangerous. As just a few examples, that could include “incidents or fear of physical harm, whether weapons have been seized on campus,” to “persistently poor academic performance.”

Nationwide, states need to review their definitions of what constitutes a persistently dangerous school and ensure policies are implemented to identify schools that fit that definition.

However, states must do more than determine the criteria that make a school persistently dangerous and label those schools as such, so parents are aware. The May 7 letter from the U.S. Department of Education outlines that according to Section 8532 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, states are required to “establish and implement a policy designed to ensure students in persistently dangerous schools are provided with an opportunity to attend a safe public elementary or secondary school, including a public charter school.”

More specifically, Section 8532 mandates that states allow parents a school choice option for their student in the following two scenarios. First, when the student attends a “public elementary or secondary school that the State has determined to be unsafe (i.e., to be persistently dangerous) based on State-determined criteria established in consultation with a representative sample of LEAs” (local educational agencies). Second, when the student becomes “a victim of a violent criminal offense, as determined by State law, while in or on the grounds of a public elementary school or secondary school that the student attends.”

Parents must have options for their children’s education. No one with a sound mind can argue against school choice when the residentially-assigned public school is utterly failing to keep children safe or provide quality academic learning — the most basic requirements of these taxpayer-funded schools.