Greg Toppo - USA Today, Oct. 21, 2003
The 2003-04 school year is only a few weeks old, but a string of fatal shootings, stabbings and other attacks threatens to make it one of the deadliest in years.
Since mid-August, when most students returned to class, the nation’s public schools have seen 18 violent deaths, more than in either of the previous two school years. And that does not include dozens of non-fatal incidents.
Young people are dying at the hands of classmates, strangers and even parents in big cities and small towns. There have been shootings in and around high schools and middle schools in Chicago and in Cold Spring, Minn., gang feuds in Tucson, stabbings and fistfights in Fort Worth and in Green Cove Springs, Fla. Apparent murder-suicides in San Diego and in Hopkinsville, Ky. Police have wounded armed students in standoffs in Spokane, Wash., and Sacramento.
While there have been no large-scale shootings like those at Columbine High School in 1999, which killed 15, the high number of incidents is baffling school safety experts, who say school violence is usually worst in the spring, pointing to a rough year ahead.
It is also raising a quiet alarm among those who work with young people.
“We have a post-9/11 world in which we have a greater sense of threat, in which our children have a greater sense of threat, of stress and anxiety,” says Ken Druck, a clinical psychologist in San Diego. “Kids are scared, and a lot of violence stems from stress and fear.”
Observers cite several possible factors, including large and impersonal high schools, violent video games, a poor economy and the stress of higher academic standards. A few note that street gangs are on the rise and that the war on terror is diverting resources from school safety.
Others simply can’t explain it, especially with all the increased attention to school safety after Columbine.
“It certainly is nothing you ever expect, and nothing that I could ever want anybody else to experience,” says Scott Staska, superintendent of Rocori Area Schools in Cold Spring, Minn., where a high school freshman shot two schoolmates dead Sept. 24 after he was reportedly teased about his severe acne. The shootings are the first gun homicides ever in a Minnesota school.
Federal crime statistics show that young people are still much safer in school than practically anywhere else, and it’s not clear whether school crime in general has risen over the past several years. The most recent figures show that it dropped in the 1990s. According to the U.S. Education Department, the percentage of public high school students who reported being crime victims dropped from 9.8 percent in 1995 to 5.7 percent in 2001. The rate of serious violent crime at or near school among students 12 to 18 dropped from 10 offenses per 100,000 students in 1992 to five in 2000.
It would be easy to blame the upswing in deadly violence on the lingering effects of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. But Sept. 11 actually may have put a dent in school homicides and suicides. In the two years after the attacks, these incidents dropped sharply, according to Ken Trump of National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland firm that tracks school crime. There were 17 violent deaths in 2001-02 and 16 in 2002-03. By contrast, the 1999-2000 school year saw 31 such deaths.
By most accounts, schools are spending more energy than ever to prevent violence. After Columbine, most districts implemented anti-bullying and peer-mediation programs. It’s not unusual to find third-graders versed in conflict resolution and “lockdown drills.”
But Bill Modzeleski of the federal government’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools says many violent incidents take place after school as students head home. “It’s a time when there is little or no control over these kids,” he says.
The threat of terrorism and school violence prompted the Education Department this month to hand out $38 million in grants to improve safety. But as the war on terror enters its third year, local officials say they are seeing some of their school safety funding dry up. In an August survey of school police by the National Association of School Resource Officers, 41 percent said safety funding had dropped.
Modzeleski says communities can take steps that don’t cost much, such as asking shopkeepers to watch students as they make their way home. “I think we’ve got to go back to saying this is a community issue,” he says.
Police have blamed several incidents this fall on a rise in gang activity - a Sept. 9 shooting in Los Angeles, in which police say three teenagers were critically wounded at a bus stop, took place after a man in a car shouted a gang challenge and fired into a crowd.
Several observers also blame the sagging economy. On Sept. 5, a San Diego man killed his son, then shot himself. The father had been having difficulty finding work.
Trump says the war on terror means that school safety “has taken a diminished role in the eyes of the media, in the eyes of the public and, perhaps most importantly, in the eyes of the legislators. I certainly hate to think that we’d get to that point in time where a kid is safer on a bridge or a monument” than in school.
Suicides and murder-suicides account for a sizeable portion of violent school deaths, about 37 percent over the past four years.
Federal statistics show that 10 percent of children younger than 18 suffer mental illness severe enough to cause “some level of impairment.” Only one in five gets treatment.
An increased emphasis on academic skills is putting children at risk because schools often ignore their social and emotional needs, says David Osher of the American Institutes for Research, a Washington-based non-profit focusing on education, children’s mental health and other issues.
Osher also criticizes the managed-care system, by which many children receive mental health services. He says many treatments require multiyear plans, but the system often won’t fund them.
In the years since Columbine, most experts have stressed that one of the most effective ways schools can cut down on violence is to combat bullying. Dawn Anna, whose daughter Lauren was killed at Columbine, says students must be taught that being silent about bullying is as bad as condoning it.
Anna also says large high schools are problematic. A former middle-school math teacher who also coached volleyball at 2,000-student Columbine, Anna says small schools help adults build stronger relationships with students.
But a small school may be a mixed blessing. A study published this week in Sociology of Education says students at small schools may be two to three times more likely to bring weapons to school.
While Rocori High School, site of last month’s Minnesota shootings, is large at 2,400 students, Superintendent Staska says the three tiny towns that feed Rocori are “very friendly, very caring, very open communities.” But the shootings have prompted adults to reexamine whether they are looking out for every kid. “We don’t assume that somebody else is caring for that student.”