Teachers Are the Hidden Casualties of School Shootings

When a school shooting makes the news, attention rightly goes to the students who were killed or injured and to the families left behind. Much less is said about the adults who were in the building, and who are expected to walk back into a classroom days later and hold everything together for a room full of children.

Trauma that teachers aren’t trained for

Teachers absorb trauma in two ways. There’s direct trauma, which is being present during an attack, sheltering students, or losing colleagues. And there’s secondary trauma, the cumulative toll of supporting students through fear, grief, and the aftermath of violence, day after day.

That second kind is easy to overlook, but researchers are starting to measure it. A large study led by Deakin University in Australia, which surveyed more than 2,200 educators, found that teachers’ secondary traumatic stress was significantly higher than that of other frontline workers, including paramedics, mental health nurses, and psychologists. The lead researcher pointed to a key difference: professionals in health and emergency services get training, supervision, and time to recover after traumatic incidents, while teachers are expected to push through.

Research on American educators who lived through school-based trauma, including shootings, points the same way. A University of Washington study found the experience was as hard on staff as on students, and that teachers’ needs were routinely sidelined in the recovery that followed.

The burden of being the “shield”

Since Columbine, a growing number of survivors have gone on to become teachers. They bring firsthand understanding of what students go through, and they also bring their own unresolved trauma into a job that now includes lockdown drills, active-shooter training, and in some states debates about arming teachers.

That expectation, that teachers should be the last line of defense, sits at the center of the problem. It asks educators to carry the emotional weight of their students’ safety on top of everything else, often without mental health support of their own.

Dr. Nina Cerfolio, a psychiatrist and expert in trauma and gun violence in NYC, who has spent the past decade studying mass shooters, has described teachers as “secondary first responders,” people who must balance their own survival with the safety of their students. She argues that the current approach gets prevention backward. In her writing on survivor-teachers, she makes the case that treating educators as shields fails both teachers and students. She also points out that billions spent on hardening schools, from metal detectors to bulletproof desks, hasn’t been shown to deter attacks. 

What does help comes earlier and costs less. Teachers who have the support and bandwidth to notice a struggling student, and social-emotional programs that help kids feel seen before a crisis builds. Supporting teachers’ mental health isn’t separate from preventing violence. It’s part of it.

What better support could look like

Some of the needed changes are straightforward, and other professions already have them. Teachers who experience a traumatic event at school could receive structured time off and access to counseling, rather than being expected back in the classroom within days. 

Schools could give staff professional supervision and trauma-informed training, as is standard in health care and social work. And leaders could treat teacher wellbeing as a safety issue, not a perk.

The people asked to rebuild a sense of safety for children after violence are often still in crisis themselves. Until that’s addressed, recovery for schools will stay incomplete.