Seven School Shootings—and the School Year Has Barely Begun

Dateline October 7, 2026

The 2026–27 school year is only weeks old, and already Education Week has recorded seven school shootings that resulted in gunshot injuries or deaths.

Three were added to the list on a single day: October 2.

At Eden Prairie High School in Minnesota, a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old were shot in the parking lot during the school's homecoming football game. In Florida, a juvenile was shot in the parking lot of Ocoee High School just after a football game. And in Indianapolis, two juveniles were shot in the parking lot of Warren Central High School following another football game. Education Week

Three schools. Three communities. Five young people wounded by gunfire. One Friday night.

There is always an argument over what constitutes a "school shooting." Different organizations use different definitions, which is one reason the numbers you see reported can vary considerably. Education Week uses a relatively narrow definition: a firearm must be discharged on K–12 school property or a school bus, during school or a school-sponsored event, and someone other than the shooter must suffer a gunshot wound. By that definition, there have been 24 school shootings during calendar year 2026, leaving 12 people dead and 22 injured as of October 5.

The Gun Violence Archive takes a broader approach to documenting gun violence generally, gathering information from thousands of law-enforcement, government and media sources. Education Week itself uses the Gun Violence Archive among the sources it consults in compiling its school-shooting tracker.

At Will You Hear Me Now?, we track these shootings for a different reason.

Several of our young colleagues have pointed out before that numbers have a way of becoming abstractions. Seven shootings. Twenty-four shootings. Thirty-four people killed or wounded. After a while, they can begin to sound like statistics rather than human events.

But every number represents a school community traumatized by the unthinkable—a horror that children should never have to experience. Students run for their lives, hide and wait for parents to find them. Football games become crime scenes. Parents receive the kind of phone call or text message every parent dreads.

We track school shootings because forgetting them is too easy.

Our mission is to give young people a voice in the epidemic of gun violence that has become part of growing up in America. We cannot honestly ask young people what they think about gun violence if we are unwilling to keep track of what is happening to them.

Seven school shootings in the opening weeks of a school year should not become just another number.

We intend to keep counting—and, more importantly, to keep listening.