How Can Parkland, Florida Be the Last One?
Anger. Sadness. Confusion. Frustration. Anger, again.
These are some of the emotions that have run through me in the hours and days since the horrible school shooting that took place this week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Once again we are left to process the “how?” and “why?” of another school shooting. Another school shooting that looks too familiar when described by the media: a shooter who by all accounts lives a lonely, friendless life; victims that we all identify with because we know versions of these teachers, coaches, and students in our own life; and the empty sound bites from elected leaders about how senseless this all is and how we need to change so many things (other than gun laws of course) to ensure this never happens again.
First, we must honor the victims and heroes from this incident so we might go deeper than the media flurry — we must connect what happened in Florida to our own lives.
Most were students, like Alyssa a 14-year old soccer player and Martin, another 14-year old. There were four more 14-year old girls Jaime, Cara, Alaina, and Gina. Also older students like Nicholas the senior swimmer who was on his way to college next fall just like fellow 2018 graduates-to-be Meadow and Helena. The list includes Carmen a National Merit Scholar semi-finalist, Alex a member of the band, Joaquin who moved to the U.S. from Venezuela and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2017, and two 15-year old boys Luke and Peter. That’s the list of students — 14 in all. Fourteen bright lights extinguished in minutes on Valentine’s Day 2018. Read the brief stories that describe the kids that their families lost and that we all lost.
The other three victims were educators. Two coaches lost their life: coach Hixon, the school’s wrestling coach and athletic director and coach Feis, one of the school’s assistant football coaches. Coach Feis’s heroism has been magnified by the story that he threw himself in front of students to shield them from the gunman’s bullets. So that makes the count 16. Finally, there’s the story of geography teach Mr. Beigel. As shots rang through the halls, Mr. Beigel ushered wandering students into his classroom, and as he began to close his classroom door he was gunned down as the shooter walked by. Seventeen students and teachers in all are gone. Very few will take the time to look at their faces and learn anything about them. Perhaps we don’t want to look too closely because, after all, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this horror nor will it likely be the last.
But what if this Florida shooting could be the last school shooting ever? Wouldn’t that be a goal worth doing everything possible to achieve so that no parent, spouse, or friend had to ever deal with something like this again? How could such a goal become reality?
How can we REALLY stop school shootings from happening ever again?
One place to start is by investing further in community and family engagement across our K-12 school system. Many states and local districts have made reaching and connecting individually with every student, parent, and caregiver in their school community a strategic priority. In so many of the school shooting tragedies we hear after the incident how the culprit (or culprits) existed largely unknown to school administrators, or if they were known, it’s obvious that they and their families weren’t connected to the broader school community in a meaningful way. Hopefully districts and schools continue to invest in efforts to utilize communication services of all forms — mobile messaging, voice calling, email — to become connected with everyone in their community, and to recognize those that appear to have become disconnected from the community so they can reach out directly.
A second area where a concerted effort at the local level could bring us closer to alleviating the threat of school shootings is to ensure that mental health services intervention reaches those in need. To be clear, while many voices following the Florida shooting were quick to blame the shooter’s mental condition for the events last week, the connection between mental health issues and violence has been shown to be well below what politicians and media coverage often claims. However, in this case (and in other school shooting incidents) the mental state of the assailant may have played a significant role in leading the shooter to the school campus armed to kill. Oftentimes the signals are there, most notably the clear evidence that these students become increasingly disengaged from the school community. Yet for whatever reason, the opportunity for these students to receive the mental health support they need never comes in time. Investing to support kids as they traverse the lonely, scary, and sometimes anger-inducing adolescent and teenage years must become a priority for all of us in this country.
Finally, if we truly want to eradicate the threat of mass shootings on our school campuses we must institute real gun control reform. Specifically, the answer to the question “should a 19-year old be allowed to purchase an AR-15 semi-automatic weapon?” must be an unequivocal “No!” Those politicians who tweeted their outrage that the Parkland shooting had occurred — and further shared their heartfelt sympathy for the victims and their families — are the same elected officials who accept millions of campaign dollars from the National Rifle Association. The public official who shines bright at this time and hopefully becomes a lightening rod for making important changes to gun laws (which need not strip anyone from their right to bear arms) is Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel. When he powerfully stated at a press conference Thursday evening, “If you’re an elected official and you want to keep things the way they are…if you want to keep gun laws as they are now, you will not get reelected in Broward County,” it felt for the first time like we have a chance to see gun law reform come as a direct result of a school shooting. More importantly, we might have a chance at legalizing gun control that would directly reduce the chances that we’ll have to witness a shooting like the one that took place in Florida.
When it comes to school violence we are all part of a complicated equation. School violence can be defined by an formula that combines many positive and negative variables that ultimately dictate the odds of school shootings continuing to happen in the U.S. All of us at Remind (like so many others working in the education industry) take immense pride in helping to develop a communication platform that represents a positive variable in this equation. While we focus on many of the day-to-day aspects of what happens in schools and classrooms, it’s not lost on us the role we might play when these events take place. And more importantly, we embrace the contributory role Remind might play in the years ahead to help remove from the school landscape events like the one that took place in Parkland, Florida.
