harrisonsdream
10-11-2006, 09:58 AM
ANA VECIANA-SUAREZ
Bulletin: Schools not immune to violence
By ANA VECIANA- SUAREZ
And I was worried about the C on my son's interim progress report.
Unless you crawled under a rock, fleeing disturbing news of our children in peril in places you thought they'd likely be safe— in other words, the halls of Congress and in front of a blackboard — you probably already know about the latest horror du jour. Last week a 32-year-old truck driver entered a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania's Amish country, shot five students to death, critically wounded others, then killed himself.
It was the third school shooting in a week. Before that a 15-year-old Wisconsin boy killed his school's principal. Two days earlier, a 53-year-old drifter sexually assaulted his female hostages at a Colorado high school before killing one and then turning the gun on himself. Anyone nursing a chronic case of déjà vu?
It has been more than seven years since Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, of Littleton, Colo., fatally shot 12 students and one teacher before killing themselves. Following extensive and exhausting media coverage, Columbine High became synonymous with school violence, the reference point for the deadly games some of our most troubled children play.
Yet, after a while, school shootings, of which there were several, drifted into a refrain, hardly making it to the top of the news or the front page. The names of the places eventually blended in, too: Lake Worth Middle School, Strawberry Mansion High School, Red Lion Area Junior High, Red Lake Indian Reservation, Santana High School.
Two of the latest incidents, however, are different. Scarier, too. The vast majority of previous school shootings involved students seeking revenge, students who wanted to draw attention to themselves. But this time it was outsiders — wackos with no connections to the school — who chose the recent targets in Pennsylvania and in Colorado, leaving us to wonder what this all means for our kids.
After Columbine, we learned to identify the bully and the bullied. We were taught the warning signs of the child ready to snap, the loner with a past waiting to catch up. We instructed our children to report suspicions and confessions, to treat each other in kinder, gentler ways. At the same time, schools overhauled security. In came metal detectors, ID badges, school resource officers and cameras in the hallways.
We thought we had done what we could. Now this — one, two, three. So once more we want to know if schools, burdened as much by safety precautions as by a never-ending battery of tests, are indeed as safe as we thought they were. And even assured of such a thing, even as we transform the halls of learning into Fort Knox, can we truly keep the world out?
Reality check: By the numbers, schools are extraordinarily safe. The chances that something like this will happen is one in a million, William Pollack, a former member of the U.S. Secret Service School Violence Task Force, told Newsweek. We lose about eight children a year to school violence, far fewer than to car accidents or to child abuse.
Nevertheless, we cannot separate school from society nor divorce classroom from culture. Because we've become a world that portrays aggression as acceptable, violence as justified and carnage as a video game scene controlled by a button, we shouldn't be surprised that these views have seeped, in one way or another, into our most vulnerable places. Schools are streets writ small.
Yes, for most of our children, education is still about interim progress reports and cafeteria lunches, about getting to class on time. But education has also turned into something more.
Since Columbine, students (and parents) have learned that violence doesn't respect school bells or ZIP codes.
this is what was in our newspaper here in houston
Bulletin: Schools not immune to violence
By ANA VECIANA- SUAREZ
And I was worried about the C on my son's interim progress report.
Unless you crawled under a rock, fleeing disturbing news of our children in peril in places you thought they'd likely be safe— in other words, the halls of Congress and in front of a blackboard — you probably already know about the latest horror du jour. Last week a 32-year-old truck driver entered a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania's Amish country, shot five students to death, critically wounded others, then killed himself.
It was the third school shooting in a week. Before that a 15-year-old Wisconsin boy killed his school's principal. Two days earlier, a 53-year-old drifter sexually assaulted his female hostages at a Colorado high school before killing one and then turning the gun on himself. Anyone nursing a chronic case of déjà vu?
It has been more than seven years since Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, of Littleton, Colo., fatally shot 12 students and one teacher before killing themselves. Following extensive and exhausting media coverage, Columbine High became synonymous with school violence, the reference point for the deadly games some of our most troubled children play.
Yet, after a while, school shootings, of which there were several, drifted into a refrain, hardly making it to the top of the news or the front page. The names of the places eventually blended in, too: Lake Worth Middle School, Strawberry Mansion High School, Red Lion Area Junior High, Red Lake Indian Reservation, Santana High School.
Two of the latest incidents, however, are different. Scarier, too. The vast majority of previous school shootings involved students seeking revenge, students who wanted to draw attention to themselves. But this time it was outsiders — wackos with no connections to the school — who chose the recent targets in Pennsylvania and in Colorado, leaving us to wonder what this all means for our kids.
After Columbine, we learned to identify the bully and the bullied. We were taught the warning signs of the child ready to snap, the loner with a past waiting to catch up. We instructed our children to report suspicions and confessions, to treat each other in kinder, gentler ways. At the same time, schools overhauled security. In came metal detectors, ID badges, school resource officers and cameras in the hallways.
We thought we had done what we could. Now this — one, two, three. So once more we want to know if schools, burdened as much by safety precautions as by a never-ending battery of tests, are indeed as safe as we thought they were. And even assured of such a thing, even as we transform the halls of learning into Fort Knox, can we truly keep the world out?
Reality check: By the numbers, schools are extraordinarily safe. The chances that something like this will happen is one in a million, William Pollack, a former member of the U.S. Secret Service School Violence Task Force, told Newsweek. We lose about eight children a year to school violence, far fewer than to car accidents or to child abuse.
Nevertheless, we cannot separate school from society nor divorce classroom from culture. Because we've become a world that portrays aggression as acceptable, violence as justified and carnage as a video game scene controlled by a button, we shouldn't be surprised that these views have seeped, in one way or another, into our most vulnerable places. Schools are streets writ small.
Yes, for most of our children, education is still about interim progress reports and cafeteria lunches, about getting to class on time. But education has also turned into something more.
Since Columbine, students (and parents) have learned that violence doesn't respect school bells or ZIP codes.
this is what was in our newspaper here in houston