Rethinking How We Evaluate School Safety: A Public Health Case for Community-Centered Assessment

School violence is a multidimensional public health crisis affecting children, families, schools, and communities. Yet conventional evaluations of school safety programs rely heavily on incident counts, suspensions, and law enforcement contacts, overlooking community perceptions, prevented incidents, and differences in local priorities. This editorial proposes a community-centered evaluation framework using the Analytic Hierarchy Process to integrate stakeholder judgments concerning the probability, severity, and manageability of school safety hazards. Pairwise comparisons and mathematically grounded aggregation procedures produce community-defined risk profiles against which prevention programs can be assessed. The framework aligns with public health approaches emphasizing surveillance, risk and protective factors, participatory intervention design, and evaluation across social-ecological levels. Its proposed implementation includes developing locally tailored models through school district site visits, deploying them through a web-based platform, and collecting longitudinal data to compare perceived program effectiveness across communities. By translating community engagement into measurable priorities, effectiveness scores, and cost-benefit assessments, the framework could support more defensible resource allocation, more responsive prevention strategies, and greater inclusion of communities disproportionately affected by violence.