ASBURY PARK, N.J., Oct. 19 — After an 18-year-old high school student was shot and critically injured just a block from a middle school here on Wednesday morning, city officials, bowing to recent traumatic memories of school shootings in other states, closed the public schools and gave about 3,000 children in this seaside town the rest of the week off.

The decision came as investigators worked to determine the motives behind the shooting of the student, Tylik Pugh, who remained on life support Thursday night at Jersey Shore University Medical Center in nearby Neptune.

Even as local officials hinted at fears of gang retaliation for the attack on Mr. Pugh, which occurred in a tough, crime-ridden section of Asbury Park, they conceded that the shooting probably had nothing to do with the town’s middle school, where the windows look down on the corner where Mr. Pugh was shot.

Still, the students and teachers heard the gunfire and that caused fear, said Robert DiSanto, president of the Asbury Park Board of Education. After consulting with the county and the state, local officials decided to close the five public schools Thursday and Friday.

“Our schools are not equipped with metal detectors,” Mr. DiSanto said as he stood outside the darkened school building. “If we kept them open, then we risk having another Columbine.”

Nearby, groups of children rode bicycles — defying a request by the school board that they be kept indoors and off the streets — and police cars swept slowly through the neighborhood of two-story, wood-frame homes.

Coincidentally, according to a spokesman for Gov. Jon S. Corzine, the governor had chosen Thursday to announce a school safety initiative.

But that was of little comfort to Mr. Pugh, who at the time of the shooting was serving a 45-day suspension from Asbury Park High School, Mr. DiSanto said.

The Monmouth County prosecutor, Luis A. Valentin, declined to comment on the investigation into Mr. Pugh’s shooting but called the neighborhood where it occurred “of concern to law enforcement because of crime.” Mr. Valentin also encouraged residents to cooperate with the police.

Neighbors spoke fondly of Mr. Pugh on Thursday as detectives questioned people on the street where the 18-year old lived.

One neighbor, Celeste Jones, said, “It’s not helping kids to be out of school.”

In recent weeks, shootings at schools in Pennsylvania, Colorado and Wisconsin have added a sense of urgency to a national debate on school safety and gun violence.

Earlier this month, a 15-year-old boy was sentenced to six years in prison for a foiled plot to shoot students and teachers at a high school in Camden County.

If the shootings have inspired an abundance of caution when it comes to student safety, at least one local official disagreed with the decision to close the schools here.

“I think it would have been safer for the kids to be in school,” rather than on the street, Councilman James W. Keady said.

Redevelopment efforts along Asbury Park’s famed waterfront have come in fits and starts as the city has struggled with financial and political setbacks. Those efforts have not reached the rough-hewn neighborhood of family homes and schools where Mr. Pugh was shot, on streets where people in surrounding towns come to buy their drugs, residents say.

The shooting of Mr. Pugh, they said, had very little to do with the schools and much more to do with the deterioration of the neighborhood.

“It’s social,” Mr. Keady said of the neighborhood’s problems, pointing to the concentration of poverty. “We need to make an investment in this part of town.”

Clayton Sandifer, the owner of Bro’s barber shop, which sits between the middle school and the scene of the shooting, compared the lives of local young people with his own childhood in the neighborhood, a time when the police mentored teenagers.

The police today “are scared of our kids,” Mr. Sandifer, 41, said, his voice rising sharply as he cut a man’s hair. “There are babies learning to be drug dealers. We need help.”

For now in this troubled seaside resort that has been trying to revive itself, the school board meeting has been delayed, and the police will be guarding football practice.