Student-on-Employee Workers’ Compensation Assault Claims Drop: Gallagher Bassett

The number of workers’ compensation claims for student-on-school-employee assault dropped significantly during the 2023-24 school year, according to data from Gallagher Bassett.

This change comes after two years of increasing claims following the 2020-21 school year.

Citing client numbers covering approximately 2,000 schools and 1.25 million students across the country, Gallagher Bassett found that such workplace injury claims were down 39% from the 2022-23 school year — with the total incurred claims cost down by almost 50%.

“We saw the frequency go down, the absolute number of claims reported is lower, and then we saw the average severity coming down as well,” said Greg McKenna, national practice leader, public sector, at Gallagher Bassett. “That was an important realization in the numbers.”

Gallagher Bassett, a third-party insurance claims and risk partner based in Illinois, defined assault claims as those that include being struck or injured by a student, bitten by a student or any other kind of human violence and alleged assault from a student to a school employee. Each school year’s data runs from July 1 to May 31.

Numbers dating back to 2017 show that the student-on-school-employee assault claim count and total incurred costs hit highs during the 2022-23 school year. The claim count reached 1,426 that year, and the total incurred costs landed at $9.7 million.

“We took a look at the frequency, and the total number of claims [and] the average cost per claim in the two years prior to the pandemic,” McKenna explained. “And then we compared that with two years after. And we happened to see a fairly significant rise in those immediate, two [yearlong] datasets after the Covid year.”

Last school year, however, the assault claim count fell to 868, and total incurred costs dropped below $5 million. When speaking about this decline, McKenna said the hope is that the data “is suggesting that maybe we did see a high watermark in the two years post-Covid.”

He added that he can’t speak to the exact cause of the drops, but he did point to the return to normal school structure as a possible factor, as well as prolific media coverage surrounding the issue of student-on-teacher-violence as increasing awareness of the issue.

Tapping into de-escalation skills that were formerly seen only in law enforcement or first response and participating in de-escalation training to learn warning signs and how to react properly is something that, anecdotally, McKenna has heard is a successful emerging risk management theme.

He also pointed to states like California, which has implemented legislation like Senate Bill 553, which requires virtually all employers to develop, implement and maintain an “effective” written workplace violence prevention plan, train employees and create and maintain extensive records regarding workplace violence.

He believes that as employers get used to these practices in California, stories of interesting risk management initiatives that have helped drive down violence in the employment environment will begin to be carried across the country.