Massachusetts school safety

In Dighton-Rehoboth, all five schools in the district's scored set filed records complete enough to grade. That is the honest subject of this page. We are not measuring how safe a school is. We are measuring how much of its record is actually there.

The federal Civil Rights Data Collection asked public schools across the country to report incidents for the 2021-22 school year. Massachusetts has 1,859 schools in that collection, and we publish a safety score for 1,041 of them — the ones whose reporting we believe. For 160 schools, the reporting looks doubtful: schools of that size normally report several incidents, or ten or more, and these reported almost none. That is a records problem, not a violence finding. It means the paperwork cannot be checked. It says nothing about what happens inside the building.

Doubtful reporting covers 8.6% of Massachusetts schools, against 11.3% nationally. Schools here fill out the federal form more completely than the country as a whole, which is a fact about administrators, not about children. Each school is compared to roughly 1,500 schools nationwide closest to it in enrollment that teach the same grades, with no adjustment for state. Differences between states in this data are differences in reporting behavior.

Plenty of schools show no score and are not graded doubtful. Those are usually small schools that reported almost nothing, where a genuine zero is common enough that we cannot call the record implausible. It is not evidence of safety either. We would rather withhold a score than imply one.

The districts we can rank

There are 401 school districts in Massachusetts, and 48 of them have enough scoreable schools to rank. The rest are mostly too small, or too few of their schools cleared the reporting bar, and a ranking built on one or two schools would move for reasons that have nothing to do with the schools. So we leave those districts out.

Among the 48, Needham and Dighton-Rehoboth rank safer than 96% of ranked US districts. Plymouth and Beverly rank safer than 94%, and Canton safer than 93%. Each ranking rests only on the schools whose data was complete enough to score: 7 of the 8 in Needham's scored set, 5 of 5 in Dighton-Rehoboth, 10 of 13 in Plymouth, 5 of 8 in Beverly, 5 of 6 in Canton. Where more of a district's set is missing, give the ranking less weight.

Safest ranked cities in Massachusetts

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 Massachusetts city with schools

Every Massachusetts school district