The fear, the fight, the future: The threat of gun violence is a new reality for today’s students

The lights were off and the door was locked in Shreya Mahadevan’s fourth-grade classroom at Johnson Elementary School. Small bodies huddled quietly behind a wall of backpacks—their teacher in tears. “It was really scary. Petrifying,” says the 9-year-old girl about the lockdown her school was under last October, when a man in nearby Johnson Village […]

Threat assessment: UVA prof says schools are safe

There are an average of 32,000 firearm deaths in the country every year—and there have been 224 school shootings since 2013. “Schools are one of the safest places for kids to be,” says Dewey Cornell, a professor at UVA’s Curry School of Education and director of the university’s Virginia Youth Violence Project. At his June […]