Crime in North Carolina public schools is down for the third consecutive year, dipping 6.6% during the 2024-2025 school year, according to new data from the NC Department of Public Instruction (DPI).
The report, presented to the State Board of Education on Feb. 4, showed that fewer than 1% of the state’s 1.5 million public school students committed a reportable offense. Seventy-eight percent of public schools had between zero and five reportable offenses, a 1% improvement from the last academic year.
Around 67% of all reportable offenses were for possession of a controlled substance or possession of alcohol. Possession of a controlled substance actually increased from the last academic year by 1.5%. A small percentage of overall incidences were violent crimes, but assault on school personnel remained a significant concern.
“Students and educators deserve safe places to teach, learn and grow,” said superintendent of public instruction Mo Green in a statement. “While there is still work to be done to address instances of reportable criminal offenses, it is good to know that the vast majority of our schools experience a minimal amount of such acts and that more than 99% of our public school students are not committing these acts. It is also encouraging to see the downward trend of not only in those offenses, but also declines in suspensions and dropouts, as we know how critical being in school is to student success.”
The report builds on previous positive data from the 2023-2024 school year that showed a 7.7% drop in crime compared to the previous school year. There was a COVID-19 era spike in crime, violence, suspensions, and possession of controlled substances in state public school classrooms.
While there has been improvement, the trendlines are still concerning when viewed through a pre-pandemic lens. The reported acts of crime and violence for the 2023-2024 school year were still 9.3% higher than in 2021-22. Moreover, incidents involving assault on school personnel and bomb threats increased, even as other major categories, such as possession of weapons, declined.
“The rise in assaults on school staff is troubling, even as other offenses have decreased,” noted Bryce Fiedler, director of the Carolinas Academic Leadership Network. “Any teacher will tell you that student discipline policies, by themselves, aren’t enough — they must be enforced and taken seriously to keep our schools a safe place for everyone involved.”
For the newest batch of data, the most likely offenders were students with disabilities, black students, economically disadvantaged students, and male students. But across those same sub-groups, instances of violence have decreased in the past two years, in many cases by double digits.
“This is a picture of persistent disparities but also meaningful progress. If we focus only on the levels, then we miss the trend,” said Dr. Michael Maher, DPI’s chief accountability officer.
The report also gauged the rate of suspensions and other disciplinary actions. While expulsions did increase from 30 in the 2023-2024 school year to 34 in 2024-2025, fewer than 13% of all students received any type of disciplinary action — such as suspensions, alternative placement for disciplinary reasons, or expulsion — for inappropriate behavior. Middle school has higher rates of suspensions, while ninth grade remains the “primary risk point,” according to the DPI data.
Drop-outs increased at the elementary and middle school levels. They decreased for high school students. Moreover, for the seventh consecutive year, there were zero reports of corporal punishments across all public school districts.
In response to the trends, DPI officials say they plan to work towards several goals, including a targeted middle-to-high school transition initiative, a move designed to address data identifying ninth grade as a primary risk point for students. The department also plans to expand annual reporting to include more advanced analyses and will continue providing training to Public School Units on handling discipline, alternative learning, and dropout data.