Teachers often make personal sacrifices for their students, purchasing classroom supplies, giving up weekends to grade, coach or chaperone, and choosing a position with comparably low pay. But one extra sacrifice is occasionally added to the job description: the ability to cope with violent attacks from students.
High-profile cases from the past decade remain powerful reminders of school violence. Less than a year after a video showing one student robbing another at gunpoint in the bathroom at Harding High School surfaced, 15 year-old Devin Scott was stabbed to death on his first day at the school in February 2023. St. Paul teacher John Ekblad was choked to unconsciousness in 2015 after he tried to break up a fight in his capacity as a lunchroom monitor, leading to a traumatic brain injury and a lifetime of neural issues.
It’s not just limited to isolated incidents. Among major metro districts, sustained public concern suggests that school violence is a systemic issue.
A 2023 St. Paul school district survey found that the majority of K-12 staff in the district felt “unsafe” or “very unsafe” in schools. Nearly 80 percent of the district’s high school staff have witnessed or experienced physical violence.
In Minneapolis Public Schools, data obtained by KSTP paints a worrying picture. From 2018 to 2019, there were 2,446 fighting incidents within the school year. Numbers dipped during the pandemic, when much instruction was online, but has steadily climbed again. In the 2022 school year, the district reported 1,501 fighting incidents.
The state’s largest district, Anoka-Hennepin, is also concerned about school violence. Data obtained by KSTP shows that between the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years, the number of staff assaulted by students jumped from 16 to 37. While assaults were confined to two different schools in the pandemic school year of 2020, the violence expanded to seven schools during the 2025 school year.
An assault by a student can have serious personal and professional consequences — and teachers are feeling the pressure of heightened risks. Gun confiscations in the 2022 school year were nearly three times higher than pre-pandemic levels. (A searchable database for weapons in schools is publicly available through Kare11.) Copycat shooting threats brought terror to the beginning of the 2025 school year. All lead to founded fear. A high majority (69 percent) of St. Paul district staff don’t think that students are safe in school.
Following state Department of Human Rights investigations in 2017 about racially disproportionate suspension and expulsion rates and the 2020 death of George Floyd, many districts continued Minnesota trends by investing heavily in policies that emphasized relationship and de-escalation over physical intervention and suspension.
One example is Stewartville’s REACH program, standing for Relationships, Education, Accountability, Character, Hard Work. The supervisor of the program, James Perry, received a human rights award in 2019. The course is an elective for students in seventh through 12th grades, and follows a restorative practices model that helps students to understand and take responsibility for their actions, rather than be punished under zero-tolerance policies. In the long term, the tactics are hoped to end the issues that cause the school’s occasional newsworthy violence, including a 2022 beating incident that led to a criminal investigation.
The experiments in restorative practices have reached the state level. In 2023, Minnesota outlawed all suspensions and most disciplinary seclusion for children in grades K-3. Teachers have argued that violence from young learners can still cause disruption, and that alternative schooling should be found for repeat offenders. (Lawmakers unsuccessfully raised the question of overturning the reforms in 2025.)
Due to unclear new legal standards that limited school resource officer abilities, many school resource officers were pulled from schools during the 2023 school year. The legislation was clarified in March of 2024, and the resource officers returned. During their absence, the only recourse teachers had for violent students was to call the police during fraught moments.
Some teachers may shy away from engaging with students out of fear of reprisal or out of a belief that the system is too overwhelmed to help them. The problems have been a long time coming. Almost a decade ago, the Twin Cities’ Pioneer Press published comments from a St. Paul teacher, who wrote,
Teachers feel powerless to discipline. I am not exaggerating. We are told to never under any circumstances touch a student as a behavioral intervention. We have no way to discipline. If a child is running around screaming, we let them run around and scream. If a student throws a chair at the Smart Board we remove the other students and call for help. If a student shouts obscenities, we simply use kind words to remind them to use kind words themselves. I am not kidding… [W]e are afraid to discipline for two reasons: district policies and fear of parent reprisals. It is more common for the parent to question the teacher’s version than to back the teacher. Every teacher can tell stories of personal threats from students and parents…I know for a fact that many of us (veterans and nontenured teachers alike) often go home in tears. I also know that my principal breaks down in tears several times each week. This thing that is happening to public education isn’t our fault.
Classroom evacuation policies, where a violent or misbehaving student is left within the classroom by themselves while the rest of the class files into the hallway, have become common. But these evacuations, which dramatically disrupt classroom time, can still leave teachers and classmates in harm’s way.
Anoka-Hennepin superintendent Cory McIntyre thinks the high number of evacuations is a problem. He noted in a June 2025 board meeting that there have been about 400 classroom evacuations in the past two years. Anoka-Hennepin is now moving forward with several recommendations developed by the district’s Student and Staff Safety Task Force. As to the recommendations, KSTP reports that
District documents show the six recommendations include establish a working group or committee to create clear and consistent documentation expectations, implement a SOAR program in every secondary school, review the district student discipline policy, annual school staff training on topics including the student discipline policy and reasonable force, purchase de-escalation online training subscription for $800 for each building, and conduct an annual staff survey to get feedback on student and staff safety protocols.
These recommendations signal the potential for future reforms. It also signals that districts are paying attention to what works. Wayzata also has a SOAR program, which is an acceleration program designed for incoming ninth graders that need alternatives to traditional education.
Any district that can find a way to ensure that there is no threat of violence on campus for students or staff should be applauded. No child or teacher should fear violence in the classroom.
However, effective policies are hard to come by. Minnesota’s tangled racial history and patchwork discipline policies across the state make sweeping reforms difficult. On a practical level, it’s also difficult for administrators and lawmakers to identify how, when, and where school safety should be addressed. Ideally, schools should study districts with low levels of violence and make recommendations for policy replication. With fully funded teaching positions going unfilled, Minnesota cannot allow the threat of daily violence to ward off quality teachers.