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Background: Educational leadership perspectives are missing from existing literature related to school shootings, which have been dominated instead by experts in criminal justice, law enforcement, and psychology. Purpose: In this article, we systematically review the literature base on educational leadership related to school shootings in the United States to identify gaps and develop an education-specific, leadership-specific research agenda for the United States. Methods: This exploratory-topographical review follows standards for systematic research reviews in educational leadership. Through reviews of 16 core educational leadership journals, and online scholarly search engines for research and keywords, we identify gaps in the current inter-disciplinary literature. Findings: We learned that the research base on school shootings is multidisciplinary, with scholars across seven different fields taking different approaches. Second, we found that while many scholars are addressing the problem of school shootings, the research base on school shootings from education researchers and specifically within the field of educational leadership are limited. Implications: We discuss three ways in which educational leaders and leadership scholars can inform school shooting research via emphasizing relationships, school–community partnerships, and meeting the needs of the marginalized. We propose preliminary recommendations for an education-specific, educational leadership U.S. research agenda, and suggestions for preparation programs.

School shooter situations can be a terrifying time for all involved. It is important that, if the situation occurs, there is a smart, efficient system in place to move each classroom to safety as quickly as possible. Methods like Run, Hide, Fight do not tell the civilians where to run, and messaging systems that attempt this are often thwarted by the shooter’s movement. A dynamic system is needed to track the shooter’s location and communicate to people how to best escape. Dynamic escape signs have been useful for improving trust and egress time during a fire. Similar smart signs could be used to respond to the shooter, updating to show safe egress routes, as well as shut down certain hallways when the shooter is within line of sight. This method has been implemented within a Unity virtual reality environment and will be tested in the future to validate its usefulness.