Our Crowdfunding Groups
The Beginnings
The first campus shooting occurred in 1840, when Professor John Davis, Dean of Faculty at the University of Virginia, was mortally wounded during a protest over the banning of guns on campus. The 20th and 21st centuries heralded a new era of mass shootings, facilitated by sophisticated semi-automatic weapons. You know the stories of Columbine, Virginia Tech, Santa Fe High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School. These are only the most conspicuous of many school tragedies too numerous to catalog. American students today have grown up with the threat of violence, constantly reminded of that threat by lockdown drills, armed guards and security or surveillance equipment in "hardened" schools. However, in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, the student-led effort to reform school safety has begun to precipitate new strategies of intervention and prevention, and a new scrutiny of previous safety initiatives and their impact on campus culture. Current research on gun violence, especially in educational settings, is limited. With your contribution and our data, universities, schools, faculty, staff, students, and parents will be able to evaluate violence prevention that goes beyond merely the hardening of the campus (which is currently a $768 billion enterprise).
Our Project
The Campus Safety Research Project, led by Pat Somers of the College of Education, has interviewed faculty, staff, and parents about safety on college campuses. With limited resources, we have researched gun violence on campus and plan to expand this effort to focus on campus safety more generally in both K-12 and post-secondary settings.
The Reach of your Support
Your invaluable contributions could help us expand our campus safety research to other college campuses and K-12 schools in our region. Practitioners in various educational settings can use our findings to improve school culture, reach out to students in distress, prevent violence, and use smart intervention methods to promote campus safety. Using the HornRaiser funds as seed money, we will hire part-time graduate research assistants who will be scheduling interviews, engaging in site recruitment for project interns, and producing articles for publication in scholarly and popular journals. Your contributions will further support the work of student interns and computer analysts, providing funds for supplies and analytical software. Your donation will allow us to dramatically expand our research, outreach, intervention, and prevention strategies, and provide research opportunities for UT student interns and research assistants. Donate now and become an advocate for campus safety research who can help ensure our schools are safe and supportive places of learning and development.
A donation of $25 can purchase supplies our researchers will need to capture stories in the field. Your support will help us record firsthand accounts across college campuses.
A donation of $100 will support our research team and connect them with stakeholders at educational institutions. You support will amplify the voices of educators, scholars, social scientists, and health care professionals addressing the issue of school safety.
A donation of $250 will support the analysis of survey data by covering the cost of software and license fees. Your support will help us better understand the ways in which campus carry influences perceptions of competence, relatedness, and autonomy at college campuses.
A donation of $500 will help sponsor a graduate internship. We are creating opportunities for graduate students engage in this important work by conducting interviews and analyzing data.
A donation of $1,000 will help fund a graduate research assistant. Your support will help bring in the best and brightest graduate students to pursue new insights into violence in education. Simultaneously, your contribution can support graduate students as strategic partners and members of this research team.
A donation of $5,000 is a vote of confidence in this important work. Your support will help us create a safer and more vibrant educational settings in Texas and beyond.
