Unfortunately, not all the lessons of the tragedy are as straightforward as a ban on these intimidating garments–which, school officials rightly noted, can be used to conceal weapons. There are certainly steps that schools can take to improve physical security, and many have done so since the appalling spate of massacres began a few years ago. But many educators and even law-enforcement officials now believe that armed guards and weapons sweeps and “intruder drills” must be supplemented with attention to the psychological and social dynamics of high school. Teachers, counselors and parents all need to be looking out for the teenager whose alienation boils over into rage. This is a daunting task, since he’s likely to be one in, literally, a million. But the realization is growing that much of the burden of preventing future tragedies like last week’s will rest with students themselves.
They are, after all, in the best position to know. “In nearly every case of recent school violence, there were warnings,” according to Ron Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Council. Unfortunately, usually no one was paying attention. Stephens cites a shooting at an Austin, Texas, high school a few years ago in which two students were injured; officials later determined that 54 students had seen the weapon before it was accidentally fired, but none of them reported it.
Of course, not all tragedies signal themselves so clearly, and it’s glib to conclude, after the fact, that the responsible adults were always asleep at the switch. Kip Kinkel, the Portland, Ore., youth whose shooting spree a year ago left four people dead and 22 wounded, had just been suspended from school after a loaded handgun had been found in his locker, and his parents had been frantically seeking help for him. But in Racine, Wis., a potential disaster was headed off when three teenagers were overheard discussing a plot to shoot up Burlington High School; the week before, principal Jose Martinez had circulated a message urging students to report any threats to the authorities. The students, who said later that it was all a joke, pleaded no contest to minor charges and were ordered to undergo counseling.
For this to happen regularly will naturally require some adjustment in teenage attitudes. “Kids have two concerns,” says Richard Lieberman, a Los Angeles school psychologist who has helped counsel students after shootings. “They’re afraid of being called a snitch. They’re also afraid that if they drop a dime on someone carrying a gun, that gun may be used against them.” Both fears are reasonable, he adds; schools have to assure students that they are doing the right thing by informing, and that their identities will be protected. It is the role of parents to get their children to break the code of omerta that governs all the lower-case mafias around the country. “The rule is: never promise your friend that you won’t tell if your friend is talking about hurting someone else or making an attempt on his or her own life,” says David Capuzzi, an authority on counseling troubled youth. “Teach kids never to make those promises.”
Schools have begun treating threats of violence, no matter how farfetched, the way airlines treat jokes about bombs. An eighth-grade girl, annoyed that a classmate was intercepting notes she was passing to a friend, wrote that the interloper was “an ugly, flat-chested ho, and I aught to kill her.” The note itself said it was all a joke, but a juvenile-court judge didn’t see it that way, according to the girl’s lawyer, who asked that her client’s name and city not be used; last month the girl was convicted of third-degree “terroristic threatening” and sentenced to six months’ probation. Some schools have made discipline issues out of violent imagery in creative-writing assignments, a tremendous victory for bureaucracy over common sense. Zero-tolerance policies on weapons have reached down to kindergartens; a Pennsylvania school suspended (although only for a day) a 5-year-old who brought in a plastic ax as part of a fireman’s costume.
So school administrators will have to exercise some judgment. “I don’t mind every kid reporting every flip comment, as long as we have somebody who can say, ‘That’s a flip comment; this is a serious comment’,” says certified psychologist Kevin Dwyer, principal author of a school-safety guide the government sent to every school in the country last fall. “One student may say, ‘Mrs. Jones gave me a D, and I could just kill her for that.’ That’s different from ‘Mrs. Jones gave me a D, I have my dad’s magnum in my backpack and at 4 o’clock this afternoon I’m going to put four shots in her head’.” An example of how not to handle the situation was provided by a teacher in another Colorado city last week who in the wake of the shootings asked his class: “Is there anyone in this school who you think could do something like this?” “The kids started calling out names,” said the mother of one student. “They were unanimous about who it would be, but I don’t think it was right for him to do that.”
The utopian ideal is for children to stop bullying one another. “I don’t think we’ll ever change the reality that kids group themselves into cliques,” says Dwyer. “But it’s the respect for the other person that’s critical. Bullying should not be tolerated in any school in the United States.” A few schools are beginning to address bullying from the victim’s perspective, with programs to teach social skills to kids who don’t seem to fit in. Starting well before high school, says psychologist Jan Hughes of Texas A<&>M University, “you need to create a culture that promotes prosocial ways of dealing with conflict.” As last week’s tragedy demonstrated, we are all–jocks and nerds, teachers and parents, even the misunderstood Goths themselves–in this together.
HOW SAFE ARE SCHOOLS?
Homicides: Fewer than 1 percent of homicides involving school-age children occur in or around schools, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control.
Shootings: Since 1992 the annual death toll from school shootings has ranged from 20 to 55, according to the National School Safety Center. In the last school year there were 40.
Theft: 43 percent of the nation’s schools had no crime at all in the 1996-97 school year, according to the Department of Education. The vast majority of incidents were minor crimes such as theft and vandalism.
Weapons: In 1997, 8 percent of high-school students said they had carried a weapon to school in the preceding month. That was down from 12 percent in 1993.
