at such a school, or while the victim was attending or on the
way to or from an official school-sponsored event. Victims
of such incidents include nonstudents, students, and staff
members. Data reported here are restricted to those pertaining
to children aged 5–18 years. SAVD includes descriptive
information about the school, event, victims, and offenders.
Although SAVD attempts to include all school-associated
violent deaths, deaths that did not appear in media databases
during the case-identification period for specific years and were
not identified by supplemental case finding efforts might be
missed. In addition, cases that are never reported by the media
might be overlooked altogether because case-finding strategies
rely heavily on news reports. However, because most of the
recognized cases receive extensive, often nationwide, coverage,
it is unlikely that many cases of school-associated homicide
or suicide went entirely unreported. If any such cases did
occur, they might differ from the cases that were deemed more
newsworthy and are characterized in this report. SAVD has
collected data from July 1, 1992, through the present.