In Philadelphia, a new school year brings questions about who’s accountable for protecting students

This story was published in partnership with The Trace , a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here .

As Philadelphia’s students settle into a new academic year, school administrators are tasked, once again, with addressing a persistent problem: gun violence in neighborhoods surrounding schools that threatens to steal or alter the lives of their students.

Though significantly fewer young people have been shot this year, three of the city’s most recent victims – a 17-year-old boy and 13-year-old girl who died, and a 15-year-old boy who was in critical condition — were teens.

The shootings were a stark reminder of the challenge faced by school officials in Philadelphia and across the country: how to protect students from a crisis they did not cause and cannot solve on their own. The volume of gun violence coming from outside school walls raises questions about what schools are responsible for doing to keep the young people in their care safe.

In Philadelphia, officials are trying to figure this out against the backdrop of a lawsuit that claims they haven’t done it right. Just before classes resumed, the mother of Nicolas Elizalde, 14, a student who was fatally shot after a football scrimmage at Roxborough High School in 2022, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging that the School District of Philadelphia is responsible for the boy’s death.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Meredith Elizalde, alleges that the district ignored the serious threat of violence, and that there were no security, law enforcement, or school district personnel in the area where the shooting occurred, in violation of district policies. The district declined to comment on the case.

Schools legally assume the role of parents during school hours and after-school activities, making them accountable for students’ safety, said Amanda Klinger, a lawyer and director of operations for the nonprofit Educator’s School Safety Network . “It’s a tricky situation. On one hand, the responsibility of the school must end, right? A school cannot be responsible for the safety of a child 24 hours in a day,” Klinger said. “However, if a school is hosting a school-sponsored activity, whether it’s happening at the school or physically across the street, they are acting in loco parentis, in the place of the parent.”

She asked: “In any of this litigation the question is, what is reasonable to ask a school to do, and where does it end?”

‘It is not reasonable … to not be prepared’

In September 2022, as Nicolas Elizalde and four other members of the school’s junior varsity football team walked across the street from the Northwest Philadelphia school, five gunmen opened fire. They killed Elizalde and wounded the four other students, who have since recovered.

After fundraising for the Roxborough football team in her son’s honor, Meredith Elizalde, a former Philly teacher, moved to Montana. Her lawyer maintains that the school district failed Nicolas. The district, said Elizalde’s attorney Tom Kline, knows that after-school hours and sport events “are a magnet” for gun violence. “When a public school district places a 14-year-old student in the shooters’ crosshairs without security or protection,” he said, “it is not just a tragedy. It is a violation of his civil rights.”

Meredith Elizalde is also suing the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA), which organizes and governs high school sports competitions. The PIAA did not respond to The Trace’s request for comment.

There have been 40 shootings at high school football-related events nationwide over the last five years, with eight taking place in Pennsylvania at PIAA-sponsored events, Kline’s office said. Three occurred at Philadelphia School District events.

“In 2024, it is not reasonable, under the circumstances, to not be prepared for the potential of violence or gun-based violence in our schools,” said Klinger.

A Philadelphia School District spokesperson said multiple layers of staff, operations, and programs ensure that schools are “safe, secure, and supportive learning environments.”

High schools and middle schools scan for weapons at their entrances, according to school district policy. At every scanning station, there’s an “amnesty box” where anyone can “dispose of any contraband” without fear of facing school discipline or law enforcement.

During the 2021-22 school year, the district implemented a Behavioral Threat Assessment Response Protocol to evaluate risks posed by students whose behavior may indicate a threat to themselves or others.

The district also has 27 trained mediators serving all schools who are called in to address the root causes of conflicts. The Philadelphia Police Department deploys officers to dedicated safety zones near the schools with the highest need.

A New Set of People Held to Account

The Philadelphia lawsuits come as school shootings receive more scrutiny around the question of who should be held responsible for the bloodshed.

In school shootings and related gun crimes across the country, prosecutors have gone beyond charging shooters to also arresting law enforcement officers, educators, and parents: On Sept. 5, Colin Gray, 54, was charged with multiple counts of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. He is accused of allowing his 14-year-old son to have the gun that the boy allegedly used to kill two classmates and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, the day before. Also on Sept. 5, a mother in Memphis, Tennessee, was arrested and charged with child abuse, neglect and endangerment after school officials discovered that her 6-year-old son had brought a loaded handgun to school.

In April, James and Jennifer Crumbley became the first parents in U.S. history charged and convicted for a mass school shooting. They were sentenced to 10 to 15 years in state prison for supplying their teenage son, Ethan, with a handgun that he used to kill four classmates at an Oxford, Michigan, high school in 2021.

And former Uvalde, Texas, school police Officer Adrian Gonzales and former Uvalde schools police Chief Pete Arredondo have been criminally charged with abandoning and failing to protect children during the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary that killed 19 children and two teachers.

Getting Ahead of the Problem

Some welcome the shift to hold such people accountable, but others say it does not address the root causes that lead shooters to target schools. Law enforcement and school officials, they say, must focus more on preventing shootings.

“We have no national guidance and no common playbook for how a school official is supposed to react to the threat of a school shooting,” said David Riedman, founder of the K-12 Shooting Database , which tracks every school shooting. “It’s on people to essentially make it up when they’re in these circumstances.”

Adam Garber, executive director of CeaseFirePA, a Pennsylvania gun-violence prevention organization, said prosecuting parents who knowingly give their troubled children guns does not save lives. “Ultimately, the problem or challenge with those solutions is that they require that there already be injured or dead people,” he said, adding that he’d rather “get ahead of the problem” through safe storage requirements and extreme risk protection orders.

While school districts cannot violence-proof schools completely, they can step up their prevention efforts, Klinger said. For example, she said, schools could create Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management teams to identify, investigate, and help students at risk of committing violence.

“It’s one of the few things that is supported by data and research,” said Klinger, the director of the school safety organization.

In Philadelphia, the School District has established a threat assessment hotline for schools to report threats, a spokesperson said. It has also purchased and developed software that allows the safety team to document threats, investigations, and safety plans.

Some, though, think that the casualty count means that these safety measures aren’t enough. “Ultimately, we think the blame for gun violence, in many ways, lies with the Legislature that enables the violence to continue,” Garber said. “We live in a world now in Philadelphia and elsewhere where violence is ever-present, and we don’t have proven policies to keep people like Nick safe.”