Jeffrey C. Long

The following was sent to me as an email from First Amendment Schools, an organization I discovered while taking classes for my teaching certificate. I believe it addresses well the steps needed to meet the challenge of disaffected students who resort to violence. And I believe that FAS is an important voice in establishing a philosophy of education in America.

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

Have we learned nothing since Columbine?

It has been six years now since the mass murders at Columbine High School. It has been just four days since the latest school shooting, in Red Lake, Minnesota. But Jeff Weise’s desperate decision to extinguish the lives of nine innocent people, and then his own, makes the memory of Columbine and other violent episodes on American school campuses feel eerily recent.

We still have a chance, as a nation, to respond to this tragedy better than we did six years ago. But to do so we must resist the urge to reach for quick fixes, and begin a deeper discussion about the role schools play in the overall mental health and social acclimatization of their students.

Experts on school shootings say assailants are typically disaffected, socially handicapped, bitterly angry young men.

“This is someone who is a failed loner,” says Princeton University sociologist Katherine Newman, editor of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings. It is someone “who is repeatedly trying to gain access to peer groups that reject him.”

That was certainly true of Jeff Weise. As a neighbor told a reporter afterwards, “nobody took the time to get to know him.” Now, everyone knows Jeff Weise’s name in death, even as his local community and the national media scramble to learn more about who he was in life.

Each of our schools has students who feel invisible, alienated, and alone. When will one child’s murderous quest for attention and visibility alert us all to the inadequacy of past responses to our other most vulnerable and disaffected young people?

Clearly, cameras and metal detectors – both were present at the school in Red Lake – are an insufficient response to student alienation and anger. Such security measures may be necessary short-term responses in some schools; but for the long-term, caring communities are not built on fear and mechanical interventions. And although physical violence of this nature is extremely rare in schools, the conditions that led up to the shooting are not.

“With every interaction in a school, we are either building community or destroying it,” says Dr. James Comer, founder of the School Development Program. Scott Poland, the director of psychological services for the Cypress-Fairbanks school district in Houston, agrees. “We need to work a lot harder on prevention,” said Poland. “We can introduce all the complicated security technology imaginable, but in the end it comes down to how well we know our students.”

With that in mind, we suggest three clear steps for schools to follow:

First, allow students to speak more, not less, in school. As the readers of this newsletter know, student speech is not the reason schools are unsafe; properly channeled and cultivated, it’s the solution that can help lead to safer schools. Indeed, students are more likely to develop a greater sense of identity and community if we as adults are willing to help them – in an authoritative but caring setting – discover the power and uniqueness of their own voice.

Second, develop policies and practices that reinforce respectful, responsible behavior. A recent World Health Organization-sponsored study of peer attitudes in the United States and 29 other countries found that American students are among the least likely to feel their classmates are kind and helpful. Moreover, the researchers suggest that “not only are students who feel unconnected more likely to abuse substances, engage in violence, and become pregnant, but they may be less likely to acquire developmental assets and to experience opportunities to demonstrate competence through increasing autonomy.”

Third, ensure that every student feels connected to at least one supportive adult at school. Ask any of the world’s most successful people to name the person who has had the greatest influence on them in life, and you’ll hear, “There was this teacher.” We all deserve such a person.

Of course, raising a child takes a community, and schools must not be expected to solve all their students’ problems. All of us can, however, take more seriously the warning signs our most troubled students send us, and create more proactively the opportunities for students to feel included, listened to, and visible. The price of not doing so is simply too great.

Sincerely,

Sam Chaltain

First Amendment Schools

Molly McCloskey

ASCD