The vast majority of Arlington Public Schools students and faculty feel safe at school, new data suggests.

A recent survey found that 88% of respondents in grades 4-5 and 85% in grades 6-12 said they felt safe, Aaron Queen, the school system’s director of safety, security and emergency management, said at a School Board meeting last week.

A survey of staff also found that the overwhelming majority say they feel “safe and secure in my work environment”: 87% of teachers, 91% of school-based staff and 92% of central office staff.

While Queen and Assistant Director James Miller expressed optimism about the new numbers, they said there is no easy way to determine how feelings of safety have changed over time.

New ways of asking school-safety questions in the 2025 Your Voice Matters survey of students and employees mean “we cannot compare this year’s data with last year’s data — it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison,” Miller said in a presentation.

The 2025 survey specifically asked students about feelings of safety, which had not been done before.

A review of a 2023-24 student survey amalgamated responses to several questions to produce a school-safety figure. It appeared to show much lower levels of perceived safety, with 66% of students in grades 4-5 and 67% in grades 6-12 feeling safe.

Additionally, a 2024 survey of staff asked if personnel felt safe in the “workplace.” Positive responses were 55% for teachers, 47% for school-based staff and 62% for central-office staff.

If the same questions asked in 2025 are asked in future years, trends may become apparent. But given the changes in wording of questions and how responses were tallied, “it’s hard to make very clean, precise interpretations of data,” School Board Chair Mary Kadera said.

Even data on reports of potential threats on school property are open to interpretation.

There has been a 34% rise in reported concerns from 2024 to 2025, with the largest increase coming at middle schools, staff said in the presentation. But Miller said that should be seen not as a spike in threats, but as the positive result of making the reporting of concerns easier.

“We’ve removed some barriers,” he said, declaring the increase is “not an indication of risk; it’s letting us know our school-based teams and training efforts are working well.”

During the presentation, Kimberley Graves — the school system’s chief of school support — referenced a recent stabbing incident at West Potomac High School in Fairfax County.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t turn on the news to see the unfortunately recent tragedies of violence in schools,” she said.

As part of its efforts to redesign safety protocols, Arlington Public Schools recently hired a threat-assessment specialist and has taken other steps , Queen said.