|
High school's efforts didn't thwart violence
Erica Werner; The Associated Press
SANTEE, Calif. -- March 9, 2001-- Santana High School did everything right: anonymous sign-in sheets for students to report threats, SWAT training for the principal, programs to help youngsters get along, including one called "Names Can Really Hurt Us." A sheriff's deputy was assigned part time to the school. Seven full-time campus supervisors roamed the grounds. Extra phones, radios and speakers were installed to spread word of trouble quickly across the 1,900-student campus. Somehow, it wasn't enough.
On Monday morning, a freshman who had been picked on and had threatened over the weekend to shoot his schoolmates opened fire in a boys' bathroom, killing two students and wounding 13 others, including two adults, police said. "We were so prepared, but it still happened," the shaken principal, Karen Degischer, said at a meeting of parents Wednesday night.
Like Santana, hundreds of schools across the country have tried to learn from the lesson of Columbine two years ago. The question now is: Is any of it ever enough?
"I think what we have to say here is there are no guarantees a tragedy can be prevented," said Pam Riley, former director of the Center for the Prevention of School Violence in Raleigh, N.C. "I've started over the past couple of years since Columbine to focus on safer schools. Not safe schools, but safer schools."
Most agree that in the end, one student with a gun can thwart all the precautions. Ted Crooks, a school board member, said: "We need to look for the complicated and subtle forces behind this, because the simple things have been done." Crooks and others said that too often, the measures schools put in place to prevent violence do not reach what some view as the core of the problem: the failure of communication between students and adults.
At Santana, for example, students who heard the 15-year-old suspect's threats did not report them. According to many students, Charles Andrew "Andy" Williams, a skinny, baby-faced boy, was bullied and called names. But he never once complained to a school official, according to district Superintendent Granger Ward. Students who witnessed the bullying didn't say anything either. School officials and students agree there is a gap between them. "Kids live in a totally different world than adults," said Karly Doyle, 16, a Santana student who said she once heard students make threats about setting a house on fire but didn't report them because, she said, she felt sure they were not serious.
The superintendent said communication between students and teachers will be emphasized anew in the aftermath of the shooting. Already, county officials have committed themselves to providing Santana and other district schools with full-time sheriff's deputies, instead of spreading deputies' duties among different schools.
Whether the new efforts will make a difference remains to be seen. "Schools have done a lot," said Bill Bond, a school safety consultant and former principal of Heath High School in West Paducah, Ky., scene of a deadly shooting in 1997. "But ... we're dealing with young, juvenile kids who are often mixed up and having a hard time growing up."
As published in The Raleigh News & Observer – March 9, 2001
###
|
|
|
|
