School Shootings Are on the Rise in Portland

In what has become a disturbing trend, a 16-year-old student at Cleveland High School was hospitalized after being shot outside the school building on Monday afternoon.

The school went into lockdown and students were sent home early. Classes were canceled at Cleveland on Tuesday.

“As gunfire rattles another [Portland Public Schools] community, I urge our community to come together and work collectively towards resolving the social problems plaguing our neighborhoods,” PPS Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero said in a statement released Tuesday morning.

It’s the third shooting outside a Portland public school in the last two months. Three Jefferson High School students were injured earlier this year in two separate after-school shootings just outside the high school—one in a car a block from the school and two others outside the school’s gym.

This will be the sixth school shooting in Portland in 2022. The national K-12 School Shooting Database, which counts the number of times “a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property,” had tallied four by October.

There were two in 2021, and one in each of the two prior years. The rise reflects a national trend.

In a September presentation outlining lessons learned by Multnomah County’s 1-year-old Gun Violence Impacted Families Behavioral Health Response Team, officials identified “emerging themes” including “exposure to violence” on social media and “an increase in high capacity and fully automatic guns.”