Maryland school safety

Filling out a federal form is not the same as keeping children safe, and this page is careful about the difference. What Maryland has in the 2021-22 Civil Rights Data Collection is unusually complete paperwork.

We call a school's reporting doubtful when schools of the same size, teaching the same grade levels, normally report several incidents or more, and this one reported almost none. In Maryland that describes 32 schools — 2.2% of the state's 1,424. Nationally, the same share is 11.3%. A Maryland record is more likely than most to be one we can actually work with.

That is a statement about records, not about children. Every grade compares a school to a large national group of schools closest to it in enrollment that teach the same grades, and the comparison is not adjusted for state. Differences between states in this data are differences in reporting behavior — what gets counted, by whom, under what local practice — not differences in how safe the classrooms are.

What you can look up here

1,100 Maryland schools have a published safety score. We publish a score only for the schools we grade A or B, because those are the records we believe. A C means the school reported almost nothing but is small enough that a genuine zero is common — not evidence of safety, but not implausible either. D and E mean the record is thin in a way that size does not explain. If your school shows no score, that is the method declining to vouch for a number, not a hole in our data.

Maryland has 25 school districts, and 22 have enough scoreable schools to rank — a higher proportion than in many states. Carroll County Public Schools ranks safer than 95% of ranked US districts, with 30 of the 43 schools in its scored set complete enough to score. Queen Anne's County Public Schools ranks safer than 93%, with 9 of 14. Howard County Public Schools, 81%, with 63 of 76. Frederick County Public Schools, 77%, with 63 of 67. Baltimore County Public Schools, 71%, with 137 of 174. Those counts describe each district's own scored set, not its full roster of schools.

What this page cannot tell you is whether something happened that was never written down. We can tell you a record is credible, or that it is thin. The rest is outside the data.

Safest ranked cities in Maryland

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 Maryland city with schools

Every Maryland school district