A version of this story first appeared in WFAE Education Reporter James Farrell's weekly newsletter. Sign up here to get newsletters from WFAE straight to your inbox.
I spent much of last week working with our public media partners across the state, keeping tabs on a busy week for the state Board of Education in Raleigh.
(Wanna catch up? Find those stories here, here and here.)
One of the big areas of discussion was the always highly anticipated crime and violence report that gives us a snapshot of school safety trends. I wrote about this latest data drop, from the 2024-25 school year, here. But the big takeaway is this: North Carolina schools saw a decrease in crimes for the third year in a row, and saw the crime rate fall by about 8% to 7.43 incidents per 1,000 students, though that’s still slightly above where it was pre-pandemic (more on that below).
Of the reportable categories of crimes, nine are considered “violent” crimes. Those increased a bit, from 250 to 302. But context is important: These are a really small part of the story – accounting for just 2.6% of the 11,470 incidents reported statewide. They occurred last year at a rate of .2 incidents per 1,000 students.
This chart also shows the big picture – possession of a controlled substance accounts for more than 60% of all incidents, and increased this year, too. And as Michael Maher of the Department of Public Instruction told the state board, 78% of schools reported 0-5 incidents this year, and more than 99% of public school students were not involved in a crime.
“So while every incident matters, the data show that severe violence is rare, and the most common challenges schools are managing are behavioral and substance-related — not widespread physical harm,” Maher said. “So any policy, procedure or programmatic recommendation we make should be proportional to that evidence.”
What about here at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools? It’s sort of the same story. But to take a deeper dive, I looked back at the data from every school year since 2014-15.
CMS crime rate above state average — but getting closer to pre-pandemic norms
Check out this nifty graph! It shows the crime rate, calculated as incidents per 1,000 students, for every CMS school year since 2014-15. If you want to fact-check me or do your own analyses, find the datasets here.
Now, before we go comparing pre-COVID rates and post-COVID rates, it should be noted that DPI often cautions us to be careful about doing that.
“We want to have folks exercise some caution when you compare pre-COVID rates to post-COVID rates,” Maher said last week, noting that the educational environment and context post-COVID is different from what it was before the pandemic (for instance, remote learning is used more often).
Still, it’s worth noting that this year appears to be something of a reset for CMS. That big V-shaped dive in the middle accounts for the pandemic year. We see that impact starting in 2019-20, which was a shortened year.
In the years prior, the crime rate was typically between 8 and 9 incidents per 1,000 students. The average crime rate between the 2014-15 school year and the 2018-19 school year was 8.58.
After the pandemic, CMS saw a spike, like pretty much every other school district in the state. In 2021-22, the rate jumped to almost 11 incidents per 1,000 students, and stayed around 10 for the next two years. This year, the rate fell from 10.07 incidents per 1,000 students to 8.79. While that’s still above this year’s state average, it’s back in that pre-pandemic range, between 8 and 9.
Deeper dive — possession of controlled substances is the big driver
So let’s look at some bright spots.
One of the biggest contributors to this year’s drop in the rate of reportable offenses was a nearly 60% decrease in the number of assaults on school personnel. There were 109 of those this year — by far the lowest out of any year I analyzed (excluding the COVID years, the next lowest was 239 in the 2018-19 school year). And it’s a far cry from the post-COVID peak of 361.
Some context to this: Assault on school personnel is not considered one of the nine violent crime categories. That’s because these incidents rarely result in serious injury. There’s another category, “assault with serious injury,” that is included in the violent crime list. In fact, assaults on school personnel are the most common type of crime reported at the elementary level, accounting for nearly half of all incidents in elementary schools.
“They often involve impulsive behavior, minor physical contact, or objects that meet the reporting requirement, but are not necessarily associated with serious injury,” Maher told the board last week.
We also saw a drop in the number of incidents involving possession of a firearm, which is welcome news after CMS led the state with nine last year. This year, there were only two, which is the lowest out of all the years I analyzed, and significant progress from the 2021-22 school year, when CMS set a state record with 29 such incidents.
So, where are there still troublesome areas?
Well, it’s worth noting that the number of incidents falling under the “violent” categories ticked up from four to 16 this year. These are generally so few in the grand scheme of a school district of this size that we should be cautious about reading too much into fluctuations like this. But I wanted to flag it because I noticed that a vast majority of these incidents — 13 to be exact – were “assaults with a weapon.” That’s the highest I’ve seen out of the years I analyzed (the next closest was 8).
But the more significant driver of the data reflects what the state is seeing: possession of controlled substances. We reached a 10-year high of more than 900 incidents after three consecutive years of increases. For context, between 2014 and 2020, the highest single-year number was 624. Possession of controlled substances accounts for nearly three-quarters of all incidents reported across CMS.
That number is also the most by a single school district last year — though that’s not entirely surprising given CMS’ size. But it even surpasses the larger Wake County, where there were 835 incidents.
In a statement, CMS told me the district was "encouraged by the most recent data from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, which reflects a continued decline in reported school-based incidents across the state."
