Just two days after the start of the Wake County School year, all attention was pulled away from the buzz of a brand new year when tragedy made national headlines. The Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis was holding a school-wide mass when an active shooter shot multiple rounds through the windows; two children were killed, and 17 people were wounded — including 14  children. 

“It scares me to be frank when I see that’s happening so often. What it leads me to believe is that it’s only a matter of time before it happens to me,” said Ayan Rahman, junior.

Most people never believe that their schools will be the next to get targeted, until they are. According to research by Everytown for Gun Safety, there has been a steady increase of gunfire on school grounds since 2016, with every year since 2021 having more than 150 incidents and 40 deaths. While there have not been as many federal laws to protect against school shootings as some people hope, Wake County has begun to take countermeasures to protect against possible threats. 

“We have a few new initiatives that are geared towards keeping our school campus more safe. Some of those are the See Something, Say Something program that rolled out last year,” said Amanda Boshoff, Principal at Athens Drive, “We also are going to have something called a RAVE panic button roll out this year, which would be more of a timely response if there’s an incident where teachers have an app on their cell phone and they could hit a panic button that would deploy police and security automatically without them having to  call the office or call 911.”

According to the News & Observer, Wake County, as of the 2023-24 school year, reported a 15.1% decrease in school crime, but the number of assaults on school personnel saw a jump from 88 to 204. Athens students have noticed the large number of violent attacks, and being disquieted by the lack of governmental response, held a walk-out against school violence on September 5, 2025. Clubs, such as SAVE (Students Against Violence Everywhere) have also popped up at Athens. 

“So SAVE is a new chapter of a national Sandy Hook organization called Students Against Violence Everywhere… The things that you might see us doing in the club is fundraising for Sandy Hook (organization) so they can do more great things to prevent violence out there, or doing things to spread awareness of the reality of gun violence in schools today,” said Rahman. 

Superintendent Robert Taylor proposed a budget asking for a $40.3 million increase to $742.9 million; however, the Wake County School Board of Education approved a budget request that included over $18 million in budget cuts. These budget cuts, in turn, resulted in schools throughout Wake County losing one to two clerical staff positions. It just so happens that Athens Drive utilized those clerical positions as attendance staff members who managed the front door and checked people in as they entered the school. 

“Schools are allotted positions and can use them for different things, and so every high school lost two clerical positions. We use those things for our front office, and one of the reasons for that is because we don’t have a front office like everyone else, so we wanted a person up at the front,” said Boshoff. 

When it comes to funding education, it is typically left to local governments, meaning districts and towns get to manage their own education budgets. 

“We hope that the state will start to fully fund education. It really shouldn’t be up to local entities, but it is causing us to have to do things, like, I’m about to have an administrative meeting right now with the assistant principals, and we’re going to take shifts to monitor the front door to make sure we have somebody there,” said Boshoff.

Athens is continuing to change, and in 2026 will have a large renovation that will add things like a larger, central office, a new library, and new classrooms. With the creation of a new main office located at the school’s entrance, clerical staff will be able to see every person who enters the building through the main entrance, as opposed to looking through cameras. The new location will make it much safer and efficient for people to be allowed access to the school. 

“You never talk to the person at the [ front ] desk [and] she doesn’t have the ability to open the door at all. So making sure that we’ve got, a good system, in a place we had last year is really important as far as the safety aspect and just seeing who’s coming in the building,” said Principal Boshoff.