The Debate Over Clear Backpacks: Do They Really Stop School Shootings?

ACROSS AMERICA — Students in school districts across the country will wear clear backpacks when they return to school in a few weeks — an illusion of safety, some school safety experts say, that does little to protect children against school gun violence.

“Optically, it’s good,” said Thaddeus Johnson, a Council for Criminal Justice senior fellow at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies in Atlanta and an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology there.

“It’s kind of like surveillance cameras,” Johnson told Patch. “It makes you feel safe, but you’re not safer.”

Among the latest school districts to adopt a clear or mesh backpack policy is the Dallas Independent School District, located about 350 miles southwest of Uvalde, Texas, the site of the second-deadliest K-12 shooting since the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012.

The school district acknowledged the transparent backpack policy, in the works before the Uvalde shooting, “alone will not eliminate safety concerns” and said it is “merely one of several steps” outlined in the district’s plan to keep students and staff safe. The policy was recommended by task forces made up of principals, teachers, security professionals and community members.

Numerous other Texas school districts have adopted similar policies, partly in response to the May 24 Uvalde school shooting, in which 19 children and two teachers were killed by a gunman armed with an assault weapon who investigators said walked into Robb Elementary School through an unlocked door.

The massacre — and the “systemic failures” in the response by the 376 law enforcement officers who eventually swarmed the school but didn’t intervene for more than an hour — have reinvigorated the debate over the best way to keep America’s schoolchildren safe in an atmosphere of escalating violence.

'A Facade Of Safety'

Clear backpacks wouldn’t have stopped the Uvalde slaughter or many other school shootings, National Association of School Resource Officers executive director Mo Canady told Patch.

“I think it’s an attempt at trying to do something,” Canady said, calling the policy an impractical response on its own because it’s easy to conceal weapons among clothing, books and other items inside.

“If you’re not willing to search it,” he said, “I’m not sure you’ve improved school safety.”

Research is limited, but a 2016 study published in the Journal of School Violence found the use of clear backpacks within a school “is significantly related to an increase in school violence.” For one thing, such policies can send a profound signal to students that they’re untrustworthy and expected to break serious rules.

Michael Dorn, who leads the nonprofit school safety group Safe Havens International, called the clear backpack polices “a facade of safety” that make adults feel safer, but kids see through. In youthful defiance, they aren’t above punking their elders by sneaking in weapons, realistic looking toy guns and other contraband, Dorn said.

In a test, his organization was able to hide 26 weapons in a backpack small enough for an elementary student to carry, including a broken down shotgun, a number of knives and grenades, Dorn said.

Clear Backpacks Started With Columbine

The transparent book bag trend dates back to the April 20, 1999, shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, that left 12 students and one teacher dead. They were a hot item in back-to-school shopping after large pharmacies and retailers stocked shelves with them at the request of school administrators nationwide, The Wall Street Journal reported.

After the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, administrators required students to wear clear backpacks when they returned to the school where 17 of their classmates and faculty were killed.

Student activists mocked the policy, saying they were no safer than before the massacre. Survivor and activist Lauren Hogg tweeted her backpack “is almost as transparent as the NRA’s agenda,” referencing the National Rifle Association, the powerful lobbying group that has stood in the way of efforts to restrict access to guns.

“Clear backpacks don’t do anything except make us look stupid,” Carly Novell, a senior at Stoneman Douglas in 2018, wrote in a tweet at the time. “We want to be safe, not uncomfortable. The only thing that can really have an impact on our safety is gun control.”

The school district abandoned the policy in favor of alternative security measures. Still, transparent backpacks remained a visible symbol of at least some action by schools to help students and staff feel safer, often after high-profile incidents.

Schools from New Jersey, where a fourth grader brought a gun to school, to suburban Detroit, where four students and 11 other people were wounded late last year in the Oxford High School shooting, have instituted similar policies. The Pflugerville Independent School District near Austin, Texas, started requiring clear backpacks at all sporting events in 2019 to match policies at surrounding schools.

‘We Need To Treat What’s Wrong’

“I’m not saying they’re trash,” Johnson of the Council on Criminal Justice said of the policies, explaining that increasing students’ sense of safety isn’t inconsequential as long as it doesn't lead to complacency.

“But there are much better investments we can make,” he said. “Anything we institute starts with an investment in people, to get at the root causes of violence in schools and empower them. That goes farther in impacting crime.”

Safe Havens International’s Dorn agrees.

“Backpacks ineffectively treat symptoms,” he said. “We need to treat what’s wrong. How are they getting the gun? Why are they getting the gun? Look at the reasons, the behaviors, things going on and deal with them, so the kids don’t feel the need to bring a weapon.”

Canady of the school resource officers group added, “Culture and climate are what we have to talk about, from leadership down to the people dealing with practical things, like when we get lax from a security standpoint.

“Let’s start with securing our perimeters,” he said. “At least start there. When you have a climate and culture that says it’s OK to prop doors open, or ‘I’m not going to report the locked door is open, someone else will handle it,’ that becomes very dangerous and leads to things like we saw in Uvalde.

“Certainly,” he continued, “I see carefully selected and specifically trained SROs as a layer and part of a solution, but can go way too far – we’ve done it before.”

After Columbine, schools adopted zero tolerance polices that allowed administrators no discretion.

“We had kids being sent to alternative schools for forgetting they had a Swiss Army Knife in their backpack," Canady said. “The goal still has to be for kids to go to school in schools that don’t feel like prisons.”

It’s Not Just Mass Shootings

Mass shootings like those in Uvalde, Sandy Hook and Parkland that rally people emotionally and politically represented only a small sliver — 7 percent — of K-12 shootings over the 10-year period ending with the 2018-2019 school year, according to a Government Accountability Office report to Congress in 2020.

School shootings most commonly resulted from disputes or personal grievances, including conflicts between gangs (31 percent). Accidental shootings came in a distant second (16 percent), according to the GAO’s “characteristics of school shootings” analysis of the Naval Postgraduate School’s K-12 School Shooting Database.

That study was based on pre-pandemic data. School shootings reached a two-decade high in 2020-2021, according to a June U.S. Department of Education report examining crime and safety in schools across the country.

The increase in violence doesn’t come as a surprise to Canady, who consults with school psychologists in his organization’s work to train school resource officers. When violence in the society at large increased early in the pandemic, he and his colleagues fretted:

“What is it going to look like when school starts back?”

Between forced social isolation from their peers during a critical time in adolescent brain development and racial justice issues raised in the 2020 George Floyd protests, “compounding problems on top of problems,” Canady said, "it did not take a rocket scientist to know, this could be ugly.”

Canady and his colleagues weren’t wrong, according to a school shooting tracker maintained by Education Week, an independent news site that exclusively covers school and education news. Education Week defines a school shooting as one in which a firearm is discharged on K-12 school property or buses while school is in session or at sponsored events, wounding at least one individual other than the perpetrator with a bullet.

In 2021, there were 34 school shootings, 24 of which occurred after schools reopened on Aug. 1. In all of that year, 15 people were killed, 12 of them students, and 53 people were injured in school shootings.

The trend continued in 2022. From the first of the year to the Uvalde shooting on May 24, there were 27 school shootings, killing 27, including 24 children, and injuring 56.

“I’m an optimist, so it’s hard for me to say what I’m about to say, but I think it could look worse when school starts back up,” Canady said. “Just from talking with the psychologist friends I deal with, it is going to take years to undo the damage the pandemic has caused. The psychological and mental aspects of it will go many years past the physical health issues.

“I dare anyone to tell me their mental health has not been affected over the past two and one-half years,” he said. “I know mine has.”

Schools have to be ready, and preperaton goes beyond cosmetic changes that give the illusion of safety and don’t address the underlying causes of escalating violence, he said.

“This is a complicated issue,” Canady said. “It’s just not as simple as some would like for it to be.”

Gun Violence In America

The common denominator in gun violence is that it happens in towns and neighborhoods across the country to people we know. It touches our communities in multiple ways, from children who pick up their parents’ handguns and accidentally shoot themselves to adolescents who end their lives with handguns to mass shootings. In this reporting project, Patch explores those and other ways gun violence impacts our lives, and what is being done to make our communities safer.

Do you have a story idea for this series? Email beth.dalbey@patch.com.