Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

The details of yesterday's shootings in Newtown, Connecticut were just starting to trickle in when my Facebook feed began to light up with posts from friends saying what they thought this story was really about. These sorted fairly clearly into a number of categories:

• It's really about the need for gun control.
• It's really about the need to allow responsible people to carry weapons to protect themselves and those around them.
• It's really about the state of mental health care.
• It's really about the need to be better parents to our kids.
• It's really about what we have become as a society.

I have seen other commentators opine as well that this is really about the need to put God back in our schools, although that particular one hasn't shown up on my Facebook feed. The Westboro Baptist Church apparently is going to picket the funerals, because it's really about tolerance of homosexuality in our country.
While each of these thoughts have their own argument behind them, and while I certainly have my opinions about the relative validity of those, I'd like to suggest that all of them are red herrings.

All of these theories help us (or at least those who believe them) feel better, because they all boil down to one message: this could have been prevented. And we desperately need to believe this could have been prevented, because otherwise this could happen again, and it could happen to us. If these theories are right, however, we can make the world safe and neat again, and sleep better at night.

In addition, we are drawn to stating what this story is "really about" because, frankly, we can't stand to really contemplate what this story is really about.

What this story is really about is that 27 people, 20 of them young children, were brutally murdered in a senseless act of violence that we will never truly understand.

We need to let ourselves sit with that reality and feel the feelings that go with it. Only then will we be ready to have reasonable discussions about what, if anything, can be done to stop it from happening again.

Photo courtesy Reuters.

I am a mental health professional, a former principal and teacher, and an expert in responding to school traumas. But today, more than anything, I am a mom. Like moms and dads and other human beings today, my feelings about the shootings in Connecticut are complex and painful.

I came home tonight wanting to hug my child, and struggling with what to say. I offer my words here (followed by some description of how he responded and why I said what I did) not because they are the only or even the best way to approach this horrible incident with children, but because they are a way, and we have to start somewhere.

Here's what I said:

I need to tell you about something that happened today. It's kind of scary, but I think you're probably going to hear about it so I wanted to tell you so you can understand it and ask questions if you want.

Today something really scary happened in a school in Connecticut. There was a teacher there, I think she taught 1st grade, and she had a grownup son who had a very bad sickness in his brain. His brain was making him think very weird things. And he decided he wanted to kill his mom. But unfortunately, when he went to kill his mom, he went to her classroom where she was teaching, and after he killed her he also killed a bunch of the kids. It was very sad and everybody is talking about it and very sad and scared.

Every kid and every parent is different, and every conversation like this happens in a specific context. In our case, my son is 7 years old. He and I have had very recent conversations about mental illness in the context of the work I do as a clinician in Community Mental Health, and the terminology "sickness in the brain" is how we've described that. Another kid might need a different or more thorough explanation.

Of course, my son did have a few things to say:

• Where's Connecticut?
• Was the sickness like a concussion, or like people who don't know what day it is or think things are true that aren't?
• I don't want to talk about it.

To this last comment, I said, "That's fine, but if you do want to talk about it, or you have questions, you know where I am."

So, why did I choose these particular things to tell my son? There is method to my madness:

I need to tell you about something that happened today. It's kind of scary, but I think you're probably going to hear about it so I wanted to tell you so you can understand it and ask questions if you want.

Kids need to know it's OK to be scared, and that you can be scared and still function and be in control. As adults, we model this and open the door to talk about emotions. Also, this opener tells him that his understanding and processing is important, in general and to me.

There was a teacher there, I think she taught 1st grade, and she had a grownup son who had a very bad sickness in his brain. His brain was making him think very weird things. And he decided he wanted to kill his mom.

This begins to point out how unusual and out of the ordinary this incident is. Kids don't know, as adults do, that this kind of violence is rare. But they do have a sense that a very bad brain disease and thinking weird things is rare. Also, the focus in this description is not on the children as targets. By giving the shootings some background and context, my son is less likely to think of this and think, "the bad guys are coming for me."

It was very sad and everybody is talking about it and very sad and scared.

Here, again, the door is open to the idea that everyone -- not just kids -- has feelings about things like this. Scared and sad are OK, as is talking about it. Telling him about this is not specifically to make him talk or to make him scared, but to include him. He is important.

I don't know what questions or comments my son will make in the days and weeks ahead. I know if he has something to say, he'll say it. We talk about these things at my house. Hard as it is, that's how it should be.

More guidance on talking to children about violence and trauma is available here.

Update: Since I wrote this yesterday, we have learned that the shooter's mother died before the shootings at the school, and was not a current teacher. My son hasn't asked about the details today, so I haven't had occasion to correct what I said yesterday, and I'm not going to unless he brings the topic up. If I had it to do over again, I would still say largely the same things, except adding that after he killed his mom, he went to the school where he used to go when he was little to kill people. Note that I would not say he went to kill kids. We don't know that, first of all, and second of all it adds an emphasis that is unnecessarily scary.

Yesterday morning, a teenager walked into the cafeteria at Chardon High School in Chardon, Ohio and opened fire, apparently targeting a particular group of students. One died immediately, another at the hospital, and several others were seriously wounded.

The news coverage about this attack has repeatedly mentioned that the school had practiced for this kind of an event. Students say they didn't know whether this was a drill or the real deal. Teachers knew how to lock down their rooms. There's no way to know how many lives were saved by this training, or whether the shooter never intended to kill more people than he did.

The news coverage also mentions that parents outside the school were alerted to the situation through text messages from their kids, and kids inside the school spread information among one another via text. Since the Columbine attacks almost 13 years ago, most states and most schools have allowed cell phones in the classroom for just this reason -- to allow kids to communicate in a life-threatening emergency.

So, here's what's bugging me. If a school is in lockdown -- if they are trained to be in lockdown -- one of the things they should know is that, during a lockdown, you turn off your cell phone.

This may seem counterintuitive. After all, isn't the entire point of having a cell phone so you can communicate in an emergency? But during a lockdown you are locking yourself inside a dark room and hiding. You are trying not to be noticed, in case the gunman comes looking for more victims in your general direction. You are silent.

And if you are silent, that means turning off your cell phone. A ringing phone -- or even the sound of one vibrating -- can be the thing that tips off the bad guys to where you are and makes you a target. And you know that if the word gets out to parents that there's a gunman in the building, phones are going to start ringing. In a situation where a shooter may be looking to shoot anyone he can easily find, you just made yourself easy to find.

When I have been at schools that practiced lockdowns, the staff always are aware that getting kids to turn off their cell phones is going to be the hardest thing because it is so counterintuitive. But it has to be done.

There is a place for cell phones in these situations. A quick 911 call can mean the difference between life and death. But then the phone goes off. While contacting your parents or your friends may feel reassuring, it's not nearly as useful as staying alive.

Everything about this story is wrong.

Based on as yet very sketchy reports, here's what we know:

An 8th grader at Cummings Middle School in Brownsville, Texas, showed a gun in the hallways at school this morning. Police were called. They ordered him to drop the gun. He didn't. He appeared to aim it at them. They shot him. He died. The gun turns out to have been an air pellet gun.

When I say that everything about this is wrong, I don't mean to imply it's not true. It's just wrong. It doesn't fit the model of a good day at middle school, certainly, but it doesn't even fit the model of a bad day. A kid is either armed or he's not -- none of this pellet gun stuff. He either wants to die and kills himself or doesn't and puts down the gun. The violence is either threatened or real. This entire episode occupies this weird no-man's land between the possibilities our brains know how to deal with.

Given that , perhaps it's not surprising that everything about the press coverage is wrong, too. The headlines read things like, "Brownsville police kill teen at middle school." While technically accurate, it sure leaves a lot of important information out.

Whose fault is this? The kid, for bringing the gun in the first place and refusing to drop it and aiming it towards police? The police for shooting when the kid wasn't actually lethally armed? The school for calling the police? The parents for this kid having access to the pellet gun in the first place?

I don't think I've ever seen a case that both so clearly begs you to blame someone and so clearly illustrates why blame gets in the way of healing. Now that this incident is over, we can all point to numerous places people "should" have done things differently. But by "should," we mean "if they had, this probably would have had a different outcome." That's really different than saying that the outcome is their fault. It's so easy to confuse "should have" with "I wish they would have" or even "next time, I hope they don't."

This happened. Period. It will never have not happened. Everyone involved in it has to make peace with that fact. While preventing it in the future may be a priority, accepting it as part of the past has to happen, too. The messy question of whose fault it was can only get in the way of that process.

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.

There are two things I often say about school shootings.  The first is that, if someone enters a school hell bent on killing the first person they see, then the first person they see is going to die.  The second I sometimes say to teachers when we talk about lockdowns -- most people who come into the school mad are not going hunting for you.  They're going hunting for me.

Today, a 17-year-old student at Millard South High School in Omaha, Nebraska, bore this out.  At about 12:40, he shot both the Principal and the Assistant Principal.  He then drove off in his car and, sometime less than an hour later, killed himself.  Both administrators are in the hospital, one in critical and one in serious but stable condition.  The shooter was a recent transfer student to the school whose father is an Omaha police officer.  He apparently used his father's gun.

What are we to make of an incident like this?  People's reactions are pretty predictable.  Here are a few that might seem familiar: There needs to be stricter gun control. Kids see too much violence on TV. Our schools aren't safe. It's poor parenting. There must have been signs. Kids today have no respect for adults. He shouldn't have been able to get anywhere near those administrators with a gun. We need metal detectors in schools. These statements all fit rather nicely into two basic categories:

Category #1:  This must be preventable and someone is to blame that it wasn't prevented.
While it is of course possible that this was preventable and that someone messed up, it is also entirely possible that everyone was as prepared and aware as they possibly could have been, and the signs just weren't there and all the procedures in the world wouldn't have stopped it.  You can install metal detectors, but that won't stop shootings in the parking lot or the foyer.  Criminals will find ways to get guns.  Good parents have messed up kids.

We want to blame somebody because the alternative is awful.  We can't really wrap our minds around the idea that something this scary could happen even when everything is done right, because that means that none of us is safe.  Which brings us to our next category:

Category #2:  I'm scared for my children's safety.
This is an interesting one, because, in fact, no children other than the shooter himself were injured in this shooting.  However, it's not much of a stretch to imagine why a parent would feel their child was in danger if someone is shooting people in the school office. 

Most parents have a pretty skewed understanding of how dangerous schools are.  School shootings, when they happen, are all over the news.  This makes them seem much worse and more common than they truly are.  The reality is that kids are safer for the six or so hours they're in school than they are any other time of the day.

Good parents also view protecting their children as one of their primary responsibilities.  Even though schools are, on the whole, very safe, they are the one place that parents have little control.  When parents drop off their babies (and yes, even the high schoolers are their babies) at school, they are taking a leap of faith that the school will do for those children what the parents would do in an emergency.  When there is violence in schools, it preys on the fears and insecurities of parents not because schools are so dangerous, but because parents aren't there.  Parents overestimate the chances that they would be able to protect their children if they were present.  The fact is, they couldn't do a better job in most cases, and in a lot of cases they would be worse.

All of this wends us back to my second stock comment about school shootings -- the shooters aren't going for the teachers or kids, they're going for the administrators.  I haven't seen many statistics on that issue.  It's certainly true in some cases, as it was in Omaha today.  However, by no stretch of the imagination is school administration the profession where you are most likely to be assaulted on the job.  You might be surprised to know that it isn't law enforcement, either.  It's actually health care.  How many of us think, "I don't want to become a nurse, it's too dangerous?"  Yet another example of how bad we are at estimating our actual risks.

My heart goes out to the families and staff at Millard South.  School is closed tomorrow, and that makes the healing process harder in a lot of ways.  It's hard to open school in the middle of a police investigation, however, so one can hardly blame them.  Walking back through those doors is going to be really hard.  And a lot of school administrators in other schools are going to be a little more jumpy at work tomorrow.

The first of six defendants was convicted today in the murder of three young adults in Newark, New Jersey three years ago and the attempted murder of a fourth.  The dead, Iofemi Hightower, 20; Terrance Aeriel, 18; and Dashon Harvey, 20; and the survivor, Natasha Aeriel, 19, were all students or soon-to-be-students at Delaware State University, were hanging out on a Newark school playground when they were attacked with guns and machetes.  At least one of the female victims was sexually assaulted.

These murders are widely referred to as the "Newark Schoolyard Murders."  They got a fair amount of attention when they happened, and the Associated Press says they

jolted New Jersey's largest city into trying to fix its crime problem.

I find this an interesting phenomenon.  Clearly this is not the only homicide Newark has ever seen.  There were 106 homicides in Newark the year that these killings took place.  What made these stand out?

While there is plenty that is fairly typical about these murders, they also have particular aspects that propel them to the top of the front page.  First of all, while people in Newark might have come to expect homicides by the time these occurred in August of 2007, there were some caveats.  Generally speaking, there was one victim at a time, killed by one or two perpetrators.  There was gang violence, but it usually killed other gang members.  The number of murders involving unknown assailants and random violence was still a tiny percentage.  In this instance, the murders happened in a low crime part of town, relatively speaking, and the victims were college students, not gang bangers.  The motive appears to have been initiating a new gang member, with robbery as an afterthought.  In short, these murders violated all of the basic worldviews that allow people to think of violence as something that happens to other people.  If these kids could be killed, anyone could.

I think that the factor that most tipped the scales in favor of massive publicity, however, was that the killings took place in a schoolyard.  When you read the term "schoolyard murders," your first thought is probably about school children being killed, perhaps by other students.  We as a society are obsessed with school violence despite lots of evidence that school is one of the safest places for children in this country.  Sending our kids to school takes a leap of faith, because we as parents can't watch over them, so murders in schools are a big deal.  In this instance, even though it was nighttime, summer, and neither the victims nor the killers were students at the school, the simple use of the term "schoolyard murders" triggers a visceral response, and we want to learn more.

Certainly these young people did not deserve to die like this.  No one does.  And to the extent that this event was a catalyst for change, that's all to the good.  It's important to remember, though, that 103 other people were murdered in Newark that year.  Not all of them were minding their own business, not all were college students, not all happened to have been killed on a school playground.  All 106 murder victims were human beings who had people who cared about them.  As the coverage of this and the remaining trials hits the news, let's take a moment to remember them, too.

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.

Last week, after a 9th grader shot another in the back of the head in Madison, Alabama, the mayor of Madison urged people to pray for the victim and the students at the school.  Local churches sent counselors.  The city and the school system worked with local clergy as well as crisis responders to provide support for those affected. 

To some extent, there is a great divide in this country with regards to the role of churches and clergy in situations like this one.  In the South, in poorer communities, and in heavily African-American communities you are much more likely to see churches stepping up to offer support.  In the North, particularly in affluent northern White communities, this is less common.  Where you fall in these groupings probably has a lot to do with how you feel about this practice. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I am White and have only worked in northern schools, although of varying degrees of poverty and varying racial demographics. So, do I think this is a good idea?  Like most things, it depends.  But I certainly think it can be if it's done well. 

The potential problem, of course, comes in trying to do an effective job of meeting people's spiritual needs in a public school setting.  I say it's a potential problem because I have seen it done both really well and really poorly.  I think we can all imagine what doing it poorly might look like.  Students come for counseling and are greeted by someone who tells them the deceased is going to hell, or to heaven, or that they should adopt that person's faith to find comfort.  Not only is this bad from a constitutional standpoint, it's not good crisis response.  This is not a good time to proselytize, and offering simple platitudes often turns out to be much less comforting than people think.

When this sort of work is done well, it is done by lay or clergy-people who have been specially trained both as chaplains and as crisis responders.  They understand the psychological process that people are going through as well as the spiritual need.  A good chaplain will follow the lead of the person they are talking to in exploring the role of faith in their thinking.  They will answer questions about God with questions about what the person themself believes.  They will offer prayer only when asked, and yes, they will be asked.  It is this training that allows chaplains of one denomination to serve in the military, hospitals or prisons and assist people with a wide array of beliefs.  They are not faith dictators, they are faith facilitators.
Every community and every culture in the world has particular expectations for the role of religion and the clergy in their lives.  If, as seems likely, that role is very prominent in Madison, Alabama, it would be wrong not to involve the religious community in supporting the children.  Furthermore, people who have experienced trauma often find themselves with strong spiritual needs, either because they want comfort or because they have serious spiritual or theological questions.  A good chaplain can help with that.  As with anything in a crisis, however, it's important that everyone knows exactly what their job is and how to do it, and sticks to that.

At about 1:45 this afternoon, a 9th grader at Discovery Middle School in Madison, Alabama pulled out a gun in the middle of a crowded hallway and shot fellow 9th grader Todd Brown in the head.  Brown is in critical condition, and the other student is in custody.  No information about a possible motive has been released.  The news coverage of this event provides an interesting view into how schools respond in a crisis and how things actually unfold.  It is also notable for what is missing from the coverage.

From the reporting, we can gather the following:  When the shooting occurred, other students ran into nearby classrooms.  At least one of those classrooms had a substitute teacher who did not have keys to lock the door.  I can say as an administrator that this is a real problem in schools.  Ideally, everyone who unlocks a classroom door, whether the regular teacher, the sub using a borrowed key, the custodian or anyone else, ought to leave the door so that it locks when it is closed.  However, few people do because they don't remember, don't think it's important, and students and colleagues can't come and go from the classroom if the door is closed without the teacher having to constantly let people in.

After the crowd scattered, the school went into lockdown.  The purpose of this is twofold -- to make sure that everyone is accounted for and the shooter has limited access to other victims, and to keep people out of the way of emergency personnel.  Few people think of it, but you might well put a school into lockdown if a child had a medical emergency in the hallway, too.  The school nurse and the school resource officer (a police officer stationed in the school) were there within seconds.  Emergency personnel were on scene within 3 minutes of the shot, which is one of the advantages of a school being directly across the street from a fire station. 

By this point, the kids who were in the classrooms were already texting each other to find out what everyone knew about what had happened.  They were also texting their parents, who can be seen in the news photo above waiting anxiously outside the school.  The days when information control was in the hands of the person who had access to the PA system are long gone.  The school was able to start releasing students approximately half an hour after the shooting, which is phenomenally fast and speaks to the efficiency with which everyone involved was working.

Here's what isn't in the coverage, but what is almost certainly true.  The shooter almost certainly has a disciplinary record, a truancy record or had already come to the attention of the administration.  If his target was not chosen at random, then chances are the victim also has a backstory.  In my experience, when horrible things happen involving kids, no matter how random it may seem, there is a 9 out of 10 chance that there is something about the child, their family, history or background that makes the situation less simple than it appears.

Also, unless the victim was chosen at random, many people at the school know what the motive was.  The fact that it's not being reported doesn't mean no one knows, it means they've been told not to tell.  There is no way this happened in a crowded hallway between two students who knew each other without either a witness or someone else connected to the people involved knowing why this happened.

The Principal at Discovery Middle School, any other administrators, and the counselors or other crisis team members have had a terrible day.  Chances are good that, while they have been busy setting up counseling for the students, no one has yet checked in on how they themselves are doing.  Chances are also good that they are not cutting themselves any slack or making sure that they take care of themselves.  This is the nature of this type of incident and of people in this kind of position.  We are trained to care for kids, but we're horrible at caring for ourselves and each other.

Even if the administrators and crisis responders are getting a little TLC, there's about a 85% chance that no one has looked in on the secretary, or even noticed what her day was like.  She spent the afternoon fielding panicked phone calls, fearing for her own safety and getting barked at by just about everyone.  She had a lot of the responsibility of coordinating the situation, but probably much less information or control than her superiors.  If there was a staff meeting to discuss the days' events, she probably was not invited.

Obviously I am speculating about the shooter, the victim and the staff at the school.  I have no actual information.  For all I know, these folks were just as well prepared for the aftermath of the day as they were for the immediate response.  What I can say is that if that is true, it is unusual.  Unless you've had the misfortune to go through something like this several times, there are lessons that you just haven't learned yet.  It's unfortunate that anyone has to learn them at all.

Update:  The victim, Todd Brown, died on Friday evening at about 8 PM.  The shooter has been charged with murder.