Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

Wednesday was the 12th anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colorado. For those of you much younger than I or living under a rock, on April 20, 1999 two students went through the school shooting, killing 12 students, one teacher and, eventually themselves. The original plot was for propane bombs to explode outside the cafeteria, sending people running directly into the line of fire. The bombs failed to go off.

On Wednesday, April 20 this year, a fire broke out near the food court of a mall in Littleton, Colorado. When it was extinguished, firefighters found two explosive devices nearby. They had not, thankfully, detonated. The mall was evacuated and the schools placed on lockdown.

Anniversaries of traumatic events are tricky things. From a distance, there is no particular reason that the anniversary of an event is any better or worse or more or less related to the event than any other day. But we don't live at a distance. Our culture tells us that one rotation of the earth around the sun is an important length of time, and each successive rotation is also important. If we had no concept of a calendar, we might not care that this week's incident coincided with the anniversary of the massacre at Columbine. Most of the time we're glad we have that concept. This week, perhaps not so much.

I first learned about the mall incident on Thursday morning from a friend's Facebook post. She noted that she has family who love to shop near there, and another friend commented that she has family there too. This is the sort of personal connection we all tend to make at moments like this. The thing is, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. On Wednesday two bombs did not go off at a mall near where bombs were placed and shootings occurred 12 years ago. Why, on Thursday, do I care that I have family that was in the area but not at that mall on Wednesday?

We notice these connections, as distant as they may seem, because of a very natural and automatic response we have to danger. When a threat is detected -- whether because we see or hear it ourselves or we simply hear about it -- our automatic response is to ask whether it affects in any way. I imagine us sending little office workers into the files in our mind to find out if we have anything filed where the danger is. If the threat is near us -- say an oncoming car -- those little people come back pretty fast with "yes!!" and we try to get out of the way. Most of the time, they come back with "no."

Once in a while, however, they come back with the news that we have stuff in a related file but it's not clear how important the relationship was. They looked under "Littleton, Colorado" and found the "Columbine" file. For my friends, they found the "shopping" and "family" files. Even though the answer to whether the threat affects us is still "no," it takes us a little longer to decide that. Even though we know we and everyone we love are OK, we are left with that nagging feeling that "no" isn't the whole answer. And so we post on Facebook and say, "This could have affected someone I care about but it didn't."

The interesting thing about such loose and tangential connections is that, when we post them, our friends all know how we feel. We've all been there, and the little office workers are just doing their job.

Quick, where were you 11 years ago today?  Don't remember?  I'll bet you do.  April 20, 1999 may not stick in your mind, but the name of what happened that day almost certainly does:  Columbine.  Eleven years ago, 12 students and a teacher were killed by two other students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in a planned attack.  The shooters killed themselves at the end of the attack.

I was on maternity leave and caring for a sick husband the day of the Columbine shooting.  I remember watching for agonizing hours as authorities attempted to evacuate the building, not sure if the shooters were dead or alive or even if they might be trying to escape by evacuating with other students.  The picture of students running out of doors with their hands in the air is still very vivid in my mind.

Columbine was not the first school shooting of that era, but it was the deadliest.  Columbine was the shooting that became the shorthand for school shootings.  Within weeks, those of us who work in schools were using the word "Columbine" to mean a school shooting that was preplanned and directed at the school as a whole or a certain list of people, but not at one individual.  Every school started looking at whether it was ready for "a Columbine," and whether it was equipped to prevent one.

So what does it mean to be the Principal of a school in a post-Columbine era?  That really depends on the school, and it really depends on how much perspective you are able to put on the threat.  On the one hand, there are still those who view school violence as something that happens in inner cities and poor neighborhoods, despite all kinds of evidence that in fact major violence is much more likely to happen in suburbs and be perpetrated by the affluent.  To these folks, anything a rich, suburban school does for security is overkill.  On the other hand, there are those who regard every troubled kid not only as a potential shooter, but as an actual one, and go wild suspending and expelling kids who desperately need mental health treatment and are not the slightest bit violent.  These folks forget that the vast majority of kids who are troubled are no threat at all, and they completely ignore the fact that disgruntled employees, angry parents and estranged spouses and significant others are also a major source of violence in schools.

There is probably a level of school security which would make absolutely certain that no weapons ever get into a school building and that no violent adult does either.  There would still be fistfights, because you can't ban fists, but little else would be likely to happen.  So why don't we?

Mostly we don't turn our schools into fortresses because we want kids to be relaxed and comfortable.  Kids under perpetual lockdown are prisoners, not students.  They are reminded every second of every day that no one trusts them, and they often live down to that expectation.  What's more, any violence that might otherwise happen inside the school is put under pressure and will someday explode, and while that may happen outside the school it may also be worse than it would have been.  We would have done nothing to prevent it, because the only thing that truly prevents it is an environment where kids trust adults enough to tell them what's going on in their lives and tell an adult when a friend is doing something dangerous.

So, we try to pay attention to who is coming into the building.  We lock the secondary entrances.  We stop strangers in the hallways.  We practice "lockdowns," which are now required by Michigan law the same way fire drills and, this being the midwest, tornado drills are.  And the rest of the time, we go about our business -- helping children learn -- and make sure we're listening to them in the meantime.  I am reminded of a line from the movie Finding Nemo, when the overprotective Marlin says that he promised his son he'd never let anything happen to him.  Dory, the ditsy sidekick, responds,

You can't never let anything happen to him.  Then nothing would ever happen to him.

In the post-Columbine era, school safety and security is about balancing the need to be safe with the need, well, to be.

Jennifer Paulson, a 30 year-old special education teacher in Tacoma, Washington was shot to death in the parking lot of Birney Elementary School as she arrived for work this morning.  The suspect was pulled over by police and opened fire some time later.  He was killed in the shootout.  The shooter was someone Paulson had worked with in college.  He started turning up at her work a few years ago and calling her 10 or 15 times a day, and she eventually got a restraining order against him.  Last Friday, he followed her in his car and was arrested for violating the order.  He spent the weekend in jail, made bail and was released on Monday.  Friday morning, Jennifer Paulson was dead.

When you hear the phrase "school shooting" you probably think of situations like Columbine, or even the hallway shooting at an Alabama middle school last month.  In our minds, violence at schools is carried out by students towards students, or by adults who are intent on harming children.  This case, like the shooting in Knoxville earlier this month and even the one in Littleton, Colorado earlier this week, paint a very different picture.

The fact is that, in any workplace including a school, the most likely person to murder another person is a current or former employee or an acquaintance or family member of a current employee.  People who open fire at schools for the most part do it for exactly the same reasons they do it in factories, office buildings and other places of business -- they are gunning for an adult who they know is there.  They are current employees who are dissatisfied and go after the boss, former employees taking out their revenge, family members commiting domestic violence homicides in public, and stalkers of all kinds, whether former love interests or people who think they should be love interests.  The biggest danger doesn't come from strangers, and it doesn't come from children.  It comes from the adults we know.

Paulson certainly was afraid for her own safety.  She had not been staying at home since the shooter was released from jail.  I don't know if she told her colleagues or her boss about this man and the restraining order.  I hope she did, but it wouldn't be unusual if she didn't.  Do you know if anyone at your work is being stalked or harassed?  Do you know if they have a restraining order against someone?  You should.

It's actually not as uncommon as you would think for schools in particular to need to deal with restraining orders and issues of people who may be a danger to the school community, but usually these take the form of orders against non-custodial parents, step-parents and former partners of parents.  From time to time a parent will come to school with a picture and a court order and tell us to call the police if the person pictured comes within a certain distance of their child.  If we're doing our job, we share that information with school staff and file it in the child's file for future reference.

It is even more common, however, for a parent who is either non-custodial or does not have physical custody of a child on a given day but has joint custody in general to turn up and pick up their child from school.  The next day, we hear from the other, very angry, parent demanding to know why we allowed this to happen.  They are always surprised to learn that we cannot enforce a custody arrangement that is not ordered by the court, nor can we enforce one that is ordered by the court if we don't have a copy.  We have no way of knowing that Tuesdays are always "mom's day" if they don't tell us.

Which brings us back to Jennifer Paulson and school employees like her.  Someone who is a threat to a teacher is a threat to that teacher's students and colleagues.  If they know where the teacher works, that is one of the easiest places to find her.  In my 19 years working in schools, however, I have only known of a restraining order involving a colleague once.  People are embarrassed to talk about people who are stalking or threatening them, particularly if it is someone they once had a relationship with.  But we can't be alert to the danger to them or to us and the children if we don't know, and it's naive to think that someone who would act so inappropriately in the first place would let a restraining order stop them if they wanted to do violence.

There is a lot of healing to be done at Birney Elementary School in the days ahead.  If Paulson hadn't told her colleagues about her stalker, they're going to have to come to terms with the question of whether they could have made a difference if she had.  We'll never know the answer to that.  Hopefully, this tragedy will encourage other women in similar situations to confide in their bosses and their colleagues, if not for their own safety then for everyone else's.