St. Paul police are offering to place officers outside every public and private school in the city in the coming week in response to the shooting of students at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis.
With St. Paul and Minneapolis public school students returning to school after Labor Day, both cities are pledging an increased law enforcement presence.
“This tragedy has shaken students, families, educators and our entire community to its core,” St. Paul Deputy Chief of Operations Kurt Hallstrom wrote in a Friday letter to school leaders. “In response, the department has felt called to offer police presence … to help bolster a sense of safety and security.”
A show of strength from law enforcement is a common reaction after a tragedy like Wednesday’s, said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. Law enforcement and everyone involved in school safety should be on the lookout for a potential copycat situation, and the presence of law enforcement can reassure students, faculty and parents, he said.
“It’s hard to think past just today at the moment — how do we get through today?” Canady said. “But from a long-term standpoint, it’s probably going to be unlikely or impossible to continue that level of commitment.”
Families and the community are grieving the loss of two innocent lives — an 8-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl were killed when the school was celebrating Mass on Wednesday morning at Annunciation Catholic Church — and another 18 people were shot and injured.
Now, as the school year gets underway, how are schools in the Twin Cities responding?
Protocols already in place
St. Paul Public Schools Superintendent Stacie Stanley sent a reminder to families Wednesday about safety protocols the district already has in place.
“As a parent and grandparent myself, I know how these tragedies affect everyone who has children in school,” she wrote.
Among the school districts using the “I Love U Guys” Foundation’s Standard Response Protocol are St. Paul’s public schools and Ascension Catholic Academy, which oversees four Catholic schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The foundation was started in 2006 by the parents of Emily Keyes, 16, who was killed in a school shooting in Colorado. She’d sent a text message to her mother that day saying: “I love u guys.”
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The foundation says the standard protocol “allows organizations, first responders, students and parents to share a specific vocabulary for quick and coordinated action.” The terms used are “Secure,” “Lockdown” and “Hold in Place.”
At St. Paul Public Schools, “staff and students are trained on what these protocols mean and what to do when one is in effect,” Stanley wrote.
Every school also has an emergency operations plan that outlines what happens in the event of an emergency, and plans are reviewed and updated on at least an annual basis.
St. Paul schools keep exterior doors locked at all times and buzz visitors in, Stanley wrote.
“Our office’s sole focus right now is getting our schools ready to safely welcome back 33,000-plus students,” said Laurie Olson, St. Paul Public Schools’ director of security and emergency management.
Situation in Minneapolis raises new concerns
Basic security steps are the building blocks for safety, said Jameson Ritter, Ascension Catholic Academy’s director of safety and security. The academy’s locations include St. Peter Claver and St. Pascal Regional in St. Paul.
“If somebody gave me a million dollars tomorrow to improve security across our entire academy, I would put it to good use,” said Ritter, who has a background in the military, law enforcement and corporate security. “But if you don’t have people making sure doors are locked or not propped open, or don’t have proper screening of visitors, it’s going to undo all of that before we even get started.”
At Annunciation Catholic Church, their practice was to lock doors after Mass began and the shooting happened shortly after, said Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara.
“There’s no question that the fact that doors were locked likely saved additional lives,” he said, though the shooter fired 116 rifle rounds through stained-glass windows.
A law enforcement officer stands outside the Annunciation Church’s school in response to a reported mass shooting, Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2025, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)
Canady, of the school resource officers’ association, said he hasn’t seen a situation “play out quite that way at a school before.”
“On occasion when you think you’ve got this figured out, that you have an M.O. of how this plays out, somebody does it differently,” he said.
Connie Hune, of St. Paul, said she’s always worried about her children’s safety, though she feels like their schools have good safety measures.
“But now, my concern is when they’re out of the building,” said Hune, who has two children attending a private Christian school and an older child at a St. Paul public school.
Behavioral Threat Assessments
Nationally, about one-third of parents of children in K-12 said they were “very or extremely worried about a shooting ever happening at their children’s school,” according to a Pew Research Center survey published in October 2022.
The survey came after the May 2022 shooting of 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Sixty-three percent of the parents surveyed said improved mental health screening and treatment “would be a very or extremely effective way to prevent school shootings.”
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension started the Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management Team in 2023. Some counties in Minnesota have them, along with school districts and corporations.
As a Cottage Grove police sergeant, Randy McAlister co-founded with a forensic psychologist the first Behavioral Threat Assessment Team in the state in Washington County in 2015; he’s since retired as a captain from the department.
“I don’t think we’re where we need to be in Minnesota with school threat assessment,” said McAlister, who owns McAlister Threat Management. “I think a lot of school districts have threat assessment programs, maybe on paper and in name only, but they’re not operating a best practices type program that we know works around the country.”
The 23-year-old shooter in Minneapolis, who died by suicide at the scene, previously attended the school. Acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Joe Thompson said videos and writings left behind show that the shooter “expressed hate towards almost every group imaginable.”
On a YouTube channel, videos that police say may have been posted by the shooter show weapons and ammunition, and list the names of mass shooters. What appears to be a suicide note to family contains a confession of long-held plans to carry out a shooting and talk of being deeply depressed.
The suspect didn’t have a criminal record that prohibited buying firearms, and police have said the weapons were recently and lawfully purchased.
There was “not substantive police contact with this individual that would have raised concern to the level that would lead us to believe this sort of a situation would happen,” said BCA Superintendent Drew Evans.
Evans emphasized that authorities “need the help of the public.”
“If there’s concerning social media behavior by anybody or … concern in their community,” people should contact law enforcement “so that we can adequately address that,” Evans said. “… That did not happen in this case.”
There previously had been three fatal shootings at Minnesota K-12 schools since 2000, according to Hamline University’s Violence Prevention Project Research Center.
St. Paul police: ‘Ease concerns’
Police tape is stretched in front of the playground at Annunciation Church and School in Minneapolis after a mass shooting there Wednesday. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
In the St. Paul Police Department letter to school leaders, Deputy Chief Hallstrom said the department could have officers present as students arrive in the morning Tuesday through Friday.
“Please note that with more than 100 schools throughout our city, we may not be able to provide officers at your school each of these four days,” he wrote. “… While our primary goal is to help ease concerns within our community, we also hope to help restore the positivity that should surround the start of a new school year.”
The Minneapolis Police Department announced they’ve increased patrols at Annunciation. Minneapolis is also coordinating with the St. Paul Police Department, Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office and other local law enforcement to expand patrols around all schools in Minneapolis over the next couple of weeks, the city said last week.
Gov. Tim Walz said Thursday that he had authorized the deployment of 14 Minnesota State Patrol troopers and six Department of Natural Resources enforcement officers to Minneapolis with a focus on schools and places of worship.
Schools in St. Paul can opt out if they don’t want an officer presence.
“Police officers will be outside as many schools as possible to greet students with a friendly face,” Superintendent Stanley wrote in a Friday letter to families. “This is something SPPD has done for our schools many times during the first week of school.”
After a police officer killed George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, the Minneapolis and St. Paul school boards voted to eliminate school resource officers.
St. Paul Public Schools put a different plan in place, and every St. Paul public secondary and pre-K-8 school has at least one school support liaison. Elementary schools and specialized sites are served by mobile liaisons, Stanley said in Wednesday’s message to families.
Ra’Von Hill, 17, said he feels safe at his St. Paul school, but he’d like to see metal detectors added. Hill, who is president of the nonprofit World Youth Connect in St. Paul, said he thinks schools need more mental health specialists and people who can connect with young people.
Hune, a community partner with World Youth Connect, believes metal detectors in schools would be a step too far. “I think that’s putting fear out there,” she said.
Meanwhile, Abdi Ahmed, a 10th-grader at a St. Paul public school who was working at the World Youth Connect booth at the Minnesota State Fair on Friday, said he believes armed security guards outside his school would be a deterrent to potential violence.
New concerns, past trauma
In the lead-up to school, Ritter was already meeting with Ascension Catholic Academy staff for regular safety refresher training when the shootings happened at Annunciation.
“The Catholic school and church community in the Twin Cities is so closely knit, and being out there to answer a lot of ‘what-if questions,’” Ritter said of the role he took. “How would we handle communication? How would we reunify our kiddos with their parents and guardians?”
Like public schools in Minnesota, private schools are also required to have drills for its emergency response programs, Ritter said.
Some challenges for religious schools, though, are funding for security and safety and generally having older facilities, he said.
Nationally, Canady said he’s seen more private schools contracting with off-duty or retired officers to serve over the last few years, but it’s still not as common as their presence at public schools.
After a school shooting, it’s natural for people to ask, “What about my community, what about my schools? Do we have a vulnerability?” said Safe and Sound Schools co-founder and executive director Michele Gay, whose daughter was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.
Their recommendation is for everyone to get involved in the work: “To better protect your most precious people, do it together,” she said.
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Faith Lofton, a mother of three and program administrator of St. Paul’s Office of Neighborhood Safety, said the measures the shooter took to carry out violence in Minneapolis show it’s “not just about the lockdowns and the drills that a school can do.”
“Schools can only do so much to keep our babies safe,” she said. It’s going to take work from lawmakers and community advocacy for investments in public safety that go beyond traditional public safety, she said.
Beyond the trauma that school shootings inflict, they can also bring up past traumas, Gay said.
A younger brother of a childhood friend of DeJiohn Brooks, CEO and co-founder of World Youth Connect, was fatally stabbed at Harding High School in St. Paul in 2023.
“It’s not one of those things that people are over yet,” Brooks said of the homicide of 15-year-old Devin Scott. “With something like what happened in Minneapolis, people go back through all of the loss, all of the shootings that have happened around them.”
This report includes information from the Associated Press.
