Texas school safety

Willis ISD sits at the top of the Texas list, and how it got there is the best short lesson in reading this page: seven of the twelve schools in its scored set had records complete enough to score. The ranking rests on those seven. It describes the schools whose reporting we could check, not every campus in the district.

For 3,518 Texas schools in the 2021-22 Civil Rights Data Collection, the incident counts filed hold up against what comparable schools report, and we publish a safety score. For the rest we publish a reporting grade instead. Every school is compared with roughly 1,500 American schools closest to it in enrollment that teach the same grade levels. Among peers that reported something, we take the 25th percentile 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. C means a school reported almost nothing but is small enough that a genuine zero is common: not evidence of safety, not implausible either.

Then there are 1,444 schools, 15.0% of the state, graded D or E. Nationally that share is 11.3%. Schools of the same size normally report several incidents, or ten or more, and these reported almost none. That is a statement about records, not about children. The comparison is not adjusted for state, and gaps between states in this collection reflect how districts fill out federal forms, not how safe their hallways are.

How Texas districts rank

Texas has 1,218 school districts. Just 165 have enough scoreable schools to rank at all — the same filter working one level up. A district needs several schools we can vouch for before a district-level number means anything.

Among those ranked, Willis ISD, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD and Boerne ISD all come in safer than 100% of ranked US districts; Plano ISD and Lamar CISD, safer than 99%. Check the scored set before you read too much into it. Lamar CISD's rank draws on 30 of the 44 schools in its scored set. Cypress-Fairbanks ISD's draws on 5 of 88, and Plano ISD's on 5 of 74.

Safest ranked cities in Texas

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 Texas city with schools

Every Texas school district