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School violence has been in the news frequently this past month, thanks to the beating death of honors student Derrion Albert by other teenagers and the shooting death of Trevor Varinecz by a school resource officer whom Varinecz reportedly stabbed several times. Parents, students, teachers, school boards, elected officials, and the public are asking what's causing these kinds of violence and positing solutions to the problem.
Over the years, I've heard academics, parents, students, and the authorities provide a very wide range of reasons why students target one another or why adults target students. Dunblane was chalked up in part to pedophila by a former Scout leader; the West Nickel Mines (Amish) School shooting to molestation and pedophila; the Derrian Albert beating to a deadly neighborhood rivalry; the the Columbine high school massacre to (among other things) bullying, cliques, antidepressant use by teens, and video games; and the Heath High School (Paducah, Kentucky) attack on the shooter's mental illness. These are the most sensational and publicized incidents of school violence over the years; for a fuller list, check out this very disturbing Wikipedia page. Of course, there are thousands more cases, ranging from fistfights to stabbings to rape and God knows what else, that occur under the radar of the national, and frequently also the local, media. I'd also posit that some of the blame can be placed on a Darwinian competition for scarce resources in impoverished school districts, parental and student poverty, suburban ennui in more affluent schools, and a persistent American history of cross-cultural distrust and misunderstanding.
Bloggers and journalists have written about the most recent incidents, particularly the Albert beating, dissecting possible causes of the violence and proposing ways to move beyond it.
Naomi Zikmund-Fisher, who blogs at Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback, is a school principal and a crisis consultant for schools and community organizations. Reflecting on the Varinecz stabbing and shooting, she writes,
A good Critical Incident Stress Management Team knows what to expect from an officer involved shooting. They know what to expect when an officer is injured. They know the patterns when a child dies, and those from violence in a school. They even know that sometimes two types of incidents combine into one event.
All that having been said, I don't think there is a team in the country that feels truly prepared for what happened at Carolina Forest High School today. There is no page in the textbook for the injury of an officer at a school in an incident resulting in an officer involved shooting of a child. As a school CISM Team Leader myself, I look at this incident and have to take a few moments just to swear under my breath before I can even consider where I would start.
This is just one more reminder that emergency preparedness isn't just about practicing for every awful event you can imagine. It's also about developing a tool kit of skills and the creativity and flexibility to use them in new ways, when those things that you can't possibly imagine in a million years happen on your watch.
At The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jonathan Zimmerman provides an historical perspective, emphasizing that strife isn't new to the schoolhouse--but guns are. Zimmerman's brief exposé goes all the way back to an 1841 story by Walt Whitman.
Jonathan Simon at Prawfsblog suggests schools need to do more to "govern crime" instead of "governing through crime." He cites Susan Saulny's New York Times piece examining how Chicago school officials are now determining which students are most likely to be victims of school violence. In short: Chicago students are more likely to be victims of violence if they are black, male, are academically off-track, and lack a stable home environment. Student victims of violence in Chicago schools miss an average of 42% of school days.
Mary at Freedom Eden wonders how recent violence will affect students' learning in a Milwaukee high school.
Barbara Twine-Thomas, who writes at Febone 1960, reflects on how youth violence has become "an American way of life." Her post chronicles several recent, and profoundly disturbing, incidents of violence by and against young people, including ones where a toddler and a teen were doused with flammable liquids and set on fire. Twine-Thomas calls on all of us to get involved in addressing the epidemic of youth violence.
Lisa H. at Chicago Moms blog reports on the unsettling
