Utah school safety

In this collection, a school district can be one charter campus or it can be several dozen buildings. That is worth knowing before you read the ranking below, because it explains the shape of this page: Utah has 157 districts, and 30 of them have enough schools with score-able records to be ranked at all. The rest are not being hidden from you. There is just not enough verified reporting inside them to say anything honest about the district as a whole.

Here is what you can learn. Every school is compared to roughly 1,500 schools nationally that are closest to it in enrollment and teach the same grades. Among the peers that reported something, we take the 25th percentile of their incident rate — a deliberately low bar — and ask whether this school cleared a quarter of it. For 756 of Utah's 1,123 schools in the 2021-22 collection, the filed records hold up against that test, and those schools get a published safety score. For 161 schools, they do not: schools of that size normally report several incidents, sometimes ten or more, and these reported almost none.

Doubtful reporting is a statement about records, not about children

That is the part to hold onto. A doubtful grade means we cannot confirm from the paperwork what happened in a building. It is not a finding of violence and should not be read as one. Many Utah schools also fall between the two groups — small enough that a genuine zero is common. That is not implausible, but it is not evidence of safety either.

Utah grades doubtful on 14.3% of its schools, against 11.3% nationally. Read that as a difference in reporting habits, because the comparison is not adjusted by state, and state-to-state gaps in this data are gaps in how districts file, not in how safe children are.

Among the ranked districts, Wasatch District rates safer than 76% of ranked US districts, with 7 of the 9 schools in its scored set complete enough to score. Uintah District rates safer than 61%, with 11 of 13. Nebo District and American Preparatory Academy each rate safer than 53%, and Jordan District 52%. Those are positions among districts that could be ranked — nothing more than that.

Safest ranked cities in Utah

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 Utah city with schools

Every Utah school district