Christian Schools Are the Safest in Two Areas. Dead Last in the Deadliest.
The safest hallways in America are in Christian schools.
I am not flattering you. That is the federal government’s own data. The Indicators of School Crime and Safety report tracks fights, weapons, gangs, and victimization in American schools, and private school students report every one of them at far lower rates than public school students, year after year.
And that is no accident. It is fruit.
What Christian Schools Get Right
There are three kinds of safe, and Christian schools win two of them outright.
Safer from corruption? No contest. Protecting a child’s soul from a curriculum that mocks his faith and a culture that celebrates what Scripture calls sin is the entire reason Christian education exists. The public school is not losing that contest. It was never entered in it.
Safer from everyday violence? Yours again, and that is the federal data above. Fewer fights. Fewer weapons. Fewer gangs. Less of everything a parent lies awake about. That’s what happens when every adult in the building knows every child’s name, when discipline means formation instead of management, and when the school day starts in prayer. The fruit of formation shows up in the hallways.
It is why parents drive past three closer schools and write the tuition check. It is why I believe in Christian education. I will say my conviction plainly: I do not believe Christian families should be sending their children to public schools at all.
And I will tell you something else I know from walking these campuses for going on two decades. Some Christian schools, an elite few, finish the whole job. They guard the soul, they keep the hallways peaceful, and they have built a real system for the worst case scenarios. I have trained their people. They exist, and they prove every excuse wrong. But they are the exception.
Far too many stop at the first two kinds of safe and leave the third to hope.
So hear everything that follows the right way. This is not an argument for the public school. It is a rebuke of the one place they are beating us.
Far Too Many Fail at the Third Kind of Safe
That third kind of safe is the day something dangerous makes its way into the sanctuary of your walls. The intruder, or the current and former student who fell through the cracks. The tornado siren at 2:40. The medical collapse in the gym. The missing five-year-old. The custody dispute that turns loud at pickup. The bomb threat the week before finals. In my experience, far too many Christian schools are unprepared for all of it. Not just the active shooter. Every emergency but one. Fire.
Every Christian school in America drills fire ad nauseam, because the fire code requires it and the fire marshal checks.
And you should know why. On December 1, 1958, fire tore through Our Lady of the Angels, a Catholic school in Chicago, and killed 92 children and three nuns. The country answered with a system. Fire codes, fire doors, sprinklers, alarms, drills, inspections, enforced in every school in America. The fires never stopped, by the way. They still come by the thousands every year.
Now ask when America last lost a child to a school building fire. You have already read the date. December 1, 1958. In every record anyone keeps, the children of Our Lady of the Angels are the last. Sixty-seven years and thousands of school fires later, that is still where the list ends, because the system worked.
Then name the schools where children were killed by violence. You already know them by heart and the list keeps growing. The Washington Post has counted more than 400 school shootings since Columbine, with at least 185 children, teachers, and staff killed by 2022 and more added every year since. Among the most recent, a Christian school in Wisconsin and a Catholic school in Minneapolis.
That is the tell. It was never about ability. One threat got a system and the other got hope. Nobody makes you prepare for the second one, so far too many schools do not.
And be honest about what did the saving in those school fires. It was not the drills. It was the sprinklers, the fire doors, the alarms, the construction codes. The building itself fights a fire, because fire obeys physics. Violence does not. A locked door buys time and is worth every penny, but no camera has ever stopped anyone and no building can make a decision. For fire, the sprinkler is the system. For violence, your trained people are the sprinkler system. Schools that answer this threat with hardware alone are copying the fire solution for a threat that thinks.
The federal government has spent significant resources studying active shootings and public school preparedness. The following data is some of what they have published.
Ninety-six percent of public schools have a written active shooter plan, up from 84 percent in 2009-10. Ninety-three percent trained their classroom teachers on safety procedures, including how to handle emergencies. Ninety-six percent drilled their students on lockdown procedures, and by 2023-24, ninety-eight percent reported written active shooter drill procedures in place.
Plan. Training. Drills. All three legs, running on a schedule, year after year, because the law says so.
So what is the number for Christian and other private schools?
There isn’t one.
Nobody Is Counting
The School Survey on Crime and Safety asks public school principals. Each of those preparedness numbers carries the words “public schools” because private, parochial, and classical Christian schools were never in the survey to begin with.
There is no federal equivalent. Nobody counts how many Christian schools have a written plan, or how many have ever drilled a child. Nobody has ever asked whether a single teacher was trained.
A mother comparing two schools in the same town can pull up detailed federal safety data on the public one. On the Christian school she is paying tuition to attend, she will find nothing at all, because nothing was ever collected.
And In Most Places, Nobody Is Requiring It Either
That is the measuring. Now look at what the law actually asks of you.
- Virginia requires an annual lockdown drill and a reviewed crisis plan under § 22.1-137.2. Public schools.
- North Carolina requires a school risk management plan and annual lockdown exercises under § 115C-105.49. Public schools.
- South Carolina requires drills under § 59-63-910. Public schools.
- Georgia passed House Bill 268 in 2025, including a panic alert requirement. Public schools.
- Texas went further in 2023 and required an armed officer on every campus during school hours. School districts. Public.
There are exceptions. Tennessee is one of the few states that reaches private and church-related schools directly, requiring an armed intruder drill, an incident command drill, and a building-level safety plan filed with local law enforcement. Illinois covers private schools under its School Safety Drill Act.
But across most of the country, the picture is the same. The state tells the public school what it must do, then falls silent on the Christian school across town.
So the Christian school sits in a strange place. No one is requiring this of you and no one is coming to check. The only people who will ever look are the parents in your carline and they are not checking. They are assuming.
What I Find When I Walk In
I cannot hand you a statistic on Christian schools, because none exists. What I can tell you is what thirty-four years and a lot of campuses have shown me. This part is not a survey. It is testimony.
The Christian schools I walk into have buildings that range from trailers to big, beautiful buildings, faithful teachers, and either no plan at all or a plan so ineffective, so discrediting, that it keeps me up at night. There’s a binder somewhere that satisfied an insurance question once. Nobody has opened it since. The staff are good people who have talked about safety and never practiced it. There’s a camera on the front door. Under it, somebody kind is holding that door open for whoever is coming up the walk, because that is what good Christians do. The camera films the whole thing.
Being told to “be safe” and “just use your judgment” does not count. Teachers need to be taught what to do, where to go, who to move, and in what order.
And I find students who are five to twelve years behind the children at the public school three miles down the road.
That public school child has the whole system working to protect her. Her school has a written active shooter plan, because 96 percent of them do. Her teachers have been trained on safety procedures, because 93 percent of public schools train them. And she has practiced a lockdown twice a year since kindergarten. By sixth grade she has done it with her own feet, in her own hallway, more than a dozen times. She knows which door. She knows who to follow.
The student at the Christian school across town, whose parents chose that school in part because they believed it was the safer place, has none of it. No plan anyone could hand her. No teacher who was ever trained. Not one drill in her entire school career.
That is the gap. It is not small and it does not close by itself.
And hear me on this, because it is the reason I wrote this article. Your school does not have a training problem or a drill problem. It is missing the entire system. A plan built for your building. Teachers trained on that plan. Students taught their part of it, age-appropriate, calm, and real. Validation that proves the whole thing works and fixes what broke. Three legs, one system. The public school runs it because the law makes it. You will run it because those children are worth it.
Training is the leg I will come back to in its own article, because it is the one that gets skipped even where the other two exist. For now, see the whole picture.
Those teachers are not negligent. Nobody ever trained them, because nobody ever had to.
Same with the students.
The Objection Worth Taking Seriously
There is real research questioning whether school drills work, and I am not going to wave it off, because it is the most honest criticism in my industry.
The National Academies took up the question at the request of Congress. Their finding, and the finding of other researchers, is that the evidence of drills protecting anyone is thin, and that certain drills leave children with fear, anxiety, and lasting distress. The drills that do the damage are the theatrical ones. Unannounced. Deceptive. Simulated gunfire. Children left believing it is real.
A drill is not training. A drill is a test.
There are three parts to an effective system and they only work in order.
First comes the plan. That is your emergency action plan, the playbook that says who does what, where everyone goes, and who decides when it is real. Second comes training and the plan is the curriculum. Every adult in the building learns their part of it from somebody who has actually done the job. Third comes validation. You have to find out whether the plan survives contact with the real building and whether the training works, under a little pressure, with a clock running. Then you grade it and fix what broke. The common tool for that third step is the drill and the drill is exactly where my industry gets it wrong.
The drills that traumatize children are the ones with nothing underneath them. No real plan, no training behind it, just adults springing a terrifying surprise on kids and calling it preparedness. Of course those fail. A drill can only validate what the plan and the training built. Where those two exist, the drill is the least frightening part of the system. Children walk fire drills every month without a tear for exactly that reason. Everyone was taught. Everyone knows the plan. The drill just proves it.
So when the research condemns badly run drills, hear it correctly. It is not an argument against preparing children. It is an argument against skipping the first two steps, and it is the reason this is a job for somebody who specializes in this field, not left to a casual Tuesday afternoon improvisation.
I have said the same thing to every pastor and head of school I have ever sat with, and I will put it in writing here. Never run an unannounced active shooter drill. Not ever. I do not scare teachers. I do not traumatize children. I do not turn a Christian school into a fortress.
That is why I do not run drills at all. I run an Emergency Preparedness Day. It is announced well in advance. Your staff trains on your plan, in your building. Your students learn some of the most useful life-saving skills a person can carry, at levels matched to their age. Then we walk the plan together in your own hallways, find what breaks, and fix it. By the end of the day, the plan is validated, the team is trained, and the children go home excited about what they can do, instead of afraid of what might happen. Fear is what people feel when they have no plan. Give them a plan and the fear leaves on its own. Everything a drill promises. Nothing the research condemns.
Training is what every school should be doing. Staff first. Then the students, at their ages. That is the work the research is actually asking for.
The strongest criticism leveled at my industry turns out to be an argument for hiring somebody who knows what he is doing.
Nobody Made Nehemiah Post a Guard
“And we prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them day and night.” Nehemiah 4:9 (ESV)
There was no statute in Jerusalem requiring a watch. No inspector was coming. Nobody was going to survey whether Nehemiah had drilled his builders. He prayed and then he posted a guard, because the work and the people were worth protecting and the responsibility was his.
That is where a Christian school stands today. The law isn’t going to make you do this and the federal government isn’t going to count whether you did. The only thing that puts a trained adult in your classrooms is a decision made by the person reading this.
Faith and preparation are not opposites. They are partners. The parents in your carline are not asking whether you were required to do this. They are trusting that you did.
Where To Start
If you do not know where your school stands, which is the most common answer I hear, we can work with that.
Take twenty minutes with me. We will find out what you have, what is missing, and what comes first. Maybe that’s getting a real emergency action plan on paper. Maybe it’s training your staff on the plan before the year starts. Or maybe you have built both, and it is time for an Emergency Preparedness Day that validates what you built and fixes what breaks. I will also tell you what not to spend money on, and that part is free.
The law sets the floor. We build the standard.
Together We Save Lives.
Jason Perry is the founder of Trident Shield and an ordained pastor. He has spent 34+ years protecting others, 16 of those as a Navy SEAL and 5 as a law enforcement officer and SWAT cop, and has spoken nationally on emergency preparedness for schools and churches.
Sources
- NCES and Bureau of Justice Statistics: Report on Indicators of School Crime and Safety. nces.ed.gov
- NCES Fast Facts: Written plans for emergency scenarios. nces.ed.gov
- NCES Condition of Education: Safety and Security Practices at Public Schools. nces.ed.gov
- U.S. Department of Education: Considerations for Education Leaders Preparing Active Shooter Drills. ed.gov
- National Academies: School Active Shooter Drills. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Illinois School Safety Drill Act, private school administrator duties. sfm.illinois.gov
- Texas DPS summary of HB 3 (2023), armed officer requirement. dps.texas.gov
- Fire Engineering: Our Lady of the Angels School Fire, 50 Years Later. fireengineering.com
- U.S. Fire Administration: School Building Fires topical report. usfa.fema.gov
- The Washington Post: School Shootings Database. washingtonpost.com
- State statutes cited directly: VA § 22.1-137.2, NC § 115C-105.49, SC § 59-63-910, GA HB 268 (2025), TN § 49-6-804, § 49-6-807, and § 49-6-808.
