Georgia school safety

Valdosta City ranks safer than 99% of ranked US districts, and all eight schools in its scored set have records complete enough to grade. Both halves of that matter. A district reaches a result like this only if its schools filed records we can check, and those records then showed few incidents.

This page is built from the 2021-22 Civil Rights Data Collection. Of the 2,327 Georgia schools in it, 1,967 carry a published safety score. The rest show no score, and that is the method working rather than a gap in it.

Here is how a school gets a grade. We compare it to roughly 1,500 schools nationwide closest to it in enrollment that teach the same grade levels. Among the peers that reported something, we take the 25th percentile of the incident rate — a deliberately low bar. A school reporting less than a quarter of what that implies for its size has not given evidence of safety. A and B are records we believe, and only those schools get a published score. C means a school reported almost nothing but is small enough that a genuine zero is common: not evidence of safety, but not implausible. D and E mean schools of the same size normally report several incidents, or ten or more, and this one reported almost none.

In Georgia, 54 schools fall into D or E — 2.3% of the state, against 11.3% nationally. Read that as a statement about paperwork. Schools here filed records we can verify more often than schools elsewhere did. It does not mean children in Georgia are safer than children in other states. The comparison is not adjusted for state, and differences between states in this data are differences in reporting behavior.

What the district rankings show

Of Georgia's 225 school districts, 79 have enough scoreable schools to rank. A district needs a body of schools whose records we can grade; where most schools landed in C, or where there are simply few schools, we leave the district out. That is not a mark against those districts. It means we cannot say either way.

Behind Valdosta City: Henry County, safer than 98% of ranked US districts, with all 50 schools in its scored set gradeable. Buford City and Butts County each rank safer than 96%, with five of five. Camden County ranks safer than 94%, with 11 of the 12 schools in its scored set gradeable.

Safest ranked cities in Georgia

Percentile is against all ranked U.S. cities (higher = safer). Only cities with ≥5 trustworthy-data schools are ranked. Home value is Zillow's ZHVI.

Safest ranked districts

Every Georgia city with schools

Every Georgia school district