School Safety, 10 Years After Columbine
To protect schools better, students need to feel more comfortable to speak out, researchers say
Before murdering 13 people, injuring 23, and killing themselves 10 years ago in one of the nation's deadliest school shootings, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold broadcast their unthinkable intentions on frequencies to which their parents, peers and teachers were not tuned in. Eric maintained a website filled with lists of whom and what he hated. Dylan turned in an English assignment that described killing other students. Both boys had been suspended from school and arrested by local police during the academic year preceding the massacre. But no one took these and other warning signs seriously or, in some cases, even noticed them at all.
Harris and Klebold are not the only school shooters whose actions leading up to their devastating acts forecast their intentions. Research conducted jointly by the Secret Service and the Department of Education shows that, since the early '90s, the majority of the school shooters have given some kind of warning signal, however cryptic, prior to their attacks. This research also shows the total number of homicides at schools has declined sharply since Columbine and the rash of school shootings in the years preceding that attack in Littleton, Colo. About half as many students ages five to 18 were killed in the seven academic years after Columbine than in the seven years before and including it.
In the decade since April 20, 1999, schools perhaps have done a better job keeping students safe by identifying potential school shooters and foiling planned attacks, experts say. But many of those experts also say schools can be better prepared to prevent or handle future shootings if they do more to help students feel comfortable reporting potential threats, develop and maintain a positive school climate, and practice their crisis management plans regularly—tasks that not all schools have made top priorities.
Katherine Newman, a Princeton University professor of sociology who has studied the causes of school shootings extensively, says schools must make it easy for students to report the threats they hear in the lunchroom and any troubling behavior they see in the hallways if administrators hope to identify potential shooters before it's too late. Newman is a strong advocate of placing school resource officers—police who serve as liaisons between school and law enforcement officials—in schools. Students tend to trust and confide in these officers, she says. She also believes that resource officers can investigate tips more efficiently than school officials. But Newman worries that funding for school resource officers is frequently the first thing cut from the budgets of school districts that have not experienced a tragedy like a school shooting.
"These programs cost money," Newman says. "In communities that have had horrible things happen, they would spare nothing to ensure they've done everything possible to keep their students safe. But in communities that have not been touched by tragedy, officials can view these types of programs as an expendable budget item."
Before writing Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, Newman and her coauthors interviewed hundreds of students in two communities that were rocked by gun violence in the late '90s. They found that students knew something of the shooters' intentions before the attacks began. Some children in Paducah, Ky., did not come to school the day of the shootings because they knew something bad would happen, although they didn't know what. Some students in Jonesboro, Ark., knew the shooters' names before police apprehended them because the shooters had bragged about their plans in the lunchroom for months. "But no one ever came forward," Newman says. "This is why I emphasize making it possible for kids to do something that's difficult for them in adolescence—crossing the demilitarized zone between adults and kids with information that could implicate a school shooter and could also lead students' peers to label them tattletales."
Helping students feel connected to their school communities is a key piece of what encourages them to come forward and report troubling behavior, says William Modzeleski of the Department of Education's Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Students who feel valued by their teachers and peers are also less likely to perpetrate a school shooting, he says, pointing to the findings of the studies conducted jointly by the Secret Service and the Department of Education over the past decade. Before writing the reports, Modzeleski and his coauthors interviewed both school shooters and bystanders. Student after student told the researchers that they did not feel attached to their school, did not feel there was anyone they could talk to, and did not feel the adults in their school communities respected them.
"To me, these interviews were a wake-up call," Modzeleski says. "We often talk about schools not having money for metal detectors or other security equipment. I'm not going to sit here and say those things are not important at all. But one of the things that is significant, doesn't cost a thing, and can help prevent a school shooting is forging connections between schools and kids. This is a must for every school."
One of the most important measures of whether a school has developed connections with its students, according to the Center for Social and Emotional Education, is school climate, another term for the overall quality of the students' lives at school. Factors that can influence a decline in school climate include bullying and student isolation from personal connections with teachers. Jonathan Cohen, president and cofounder of the CSEE, a New York-based nonprofit that focuses on school social environments, has researched the implications of positive and negative school climate and has found a correlation between positive, well-connected school climates and increased academic achievement and decreased school violence.
Although many school officials are in favor of making school climate a priority to reap the benefits of this correlation, some do not measure it properly, Cohen says. "Homegrown school climate tools are no good," he says. "When we don't measure properly, we inadvertently become blind to how safe or not safe and how connected or not connected our students feel."
Though school shootings are tragic and memorable, they are also occur relatively infrequently and account for just 1 percent of the homicides of school-age youth, according to the Secret Service and the Department of Education research. Because it is unreasonable to expect that schools are capable of preventing every single one of these rare acts, another key piece of keeping students safe at school is a school's ability to minimize the mayhem caused by a school shooting through regular practice of crisis management plans. Many schools have excellent plans on paper, says school safety and security expert Kenneth Trump, but few schools run drills to practice and test the plans or update them frequently enough to be sure they would be relevant if a school shooting occurred.
Trump says students will be safer if schools do little things like running evacuation and lockdown drills once a month, ensuring everyone in the school community knows how to dial 911 from the building, and checking to see if school officials have keys to the building listed on paper as the emergency evacuation site. Trump, who formerly handled school security for districts in and near Cleveland and now works as president of a school safety consultation agency, added that part of schools' waning interest in practicing and updating their crisis management plans is the amount of time that has passed since Columbine. Today's high school sophomores were in kindergarten when the Columbine shootings took place, and today's superintendents, teachers and school staff may not have had their current jobs on April 20, 1999. The further away from Columbine we get, Trump says, the easier it is for administrators to believe a shooting can't happen in their school because it has not happened there before, a hope that Columbine should have proved wrong.
No one is more familiar with such a false sense of security than Columbine High School Principal Frank DeAngelis. This is his 13th year as principal and 30th year as an educator at the school. High percentages of Columbine's students graduate and go on to college, and parents are heavily involved in their children's school experiences, yet until the Virginia Tech massacre, Columbine was the site of the worst school shooting in the nation's history. "No one is immune to tragedy," DeAngelis says. "Your community is just like mine."
Since the shootings, Columbine has taken steps to make the school safer. DeAngelis says students have followed through on his request to report alarming behavior to adults or through the school's anonymous tip box. He says he helps maintain a positive school climate by personally getting to know students in small groups, a task that begins each year during the first few days of school. Columbine has surveillance equipment to continuously monitor entryways and hallways. But all of the work DeAngelis has done since April 20, 1999, to protect the school doesn't mean he has put the shootings behind him.
"The experience was very difficult for me, and there is not a day I don't think about it," DeAngelis says. "I walked right into the gunfire, but I did not get killed, and for a long time I felt like the CEO of a failing company or the captain of a sinking ship. Why did I survive when 15 members of my school community lost their lives?"
On the fifth anniversary of the shootings, DeAngelis began to think of the lives lost a little differently. "I heard Dawn Anna speak—she is the mother of Lauren Townsend, one of the students who was killed—and she asked all of us to stop thinking about the students' deaths and start celebrating their lives," DeAngelis says. "Now, instead of remembering them on that day, I think of them where they belong in my memory—in the halls, on the stage, or running across the athletic fields."
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