Monday was the ten year anniversary of the horrible tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. I have been think about Columbine a lot the last couple of days and remembering what it was like ten years ago.
The day in April 1999 I was in my first year of seminary and working with the youth group at a church in Denver. I was out to lunch with the youth pastor that day and when we came back to the church some ran up to us and told us that there had been a shooting over at Columbine.
Growing up in PG County Maryland, the news of a school violence didn’t shock me, even though I don’t remember school shootings growing up. But I, like the youth pastor was concerned. We had 12 students from our youth group at Columbine, including the youth pastor’s niece and nephew. He immediately went out to the school and I went home to do some work.
When I got home I turned on the TV, around 1:30 or so to see if there was any news on the shooting and I sat down. About ten hours later I finally stopped watching reports about the events of that day. I couldn’t move, nor could I turn it off. The senseless evil that had taken place shattered me. Mercifully none of our students were killed that day, but plenty of other peoples children were and I wept for them.This may have been the first moment of overwhelming empathy that I had ever known.
I don’t remember much from the next couple of days except for lots of time with devastated students and families, lots of prayer and a sense that everything had changed.
Being so soon into ministry and seminary when Columbine took place, it profoundly impacted my understanding of what being a pastor is. I realized then that ministry was going to be ugly. I realized that it would be filled with moments of unimaginable pain and senseless violence. I also realized that God’s mercy was bigger than any of it. I think that was the day when I began to understand the work of Christ. Jesus didn’t just come to save me from my sins, he came to once for all defeat evil and write a new ending to the story. Jesus came so that we could have hope that a kingdom is coming where there won’t be any more days like April 20, 1999. The kingdom of God is coming so that there will be no more Columbines.
There will be no more teenagers who feel alone, forgotten, angry, vengeful, and are filled with true evil. There will be more children who go to school and don’t come home. There will be no more parents burying their children. There will be no more days of infamy. Instead every day will be a day of glory, God’s glory.
In fact, already everyday is a day of God’s glory already, that is the promise of Easter isn’t it? The kingdom may not yet be here in its fullness, but the end of the story is written, the battle is won, the victory is assured. So today, with all the tragedies that we will face, with the uncertainty of financial markets, with the children that will die from lack of food on a day when I will eat too much, with families that are being torn asunder, with men of God dying in their beds from cancer, with so much ever present evil I will simply say thanks be to God. For Jesus has risen from the tomb and even death itself has been defeated!
April 23, 2009 at 4:43 am
Research has determined that from the Moment of Commitment (the point when a student pulls their weapon) to the Moment of Completion (when the last round is fired) is only 5 seconds. If it is the intent of a school district to react to this violence, they will do so over the wounded and/or slain bodies of students, teachers and administrators.
Educational institutions clearly want safe and secure schools. Administrators are perennially queried by parents about the safety of their schools. The commonplace answers, intended to reassure anxious parents, focus on the school resource officers and emergency procedures. While useful, these less than adequate efforts do not begin to provide a definitive answer to preventing school violence, nor do they make a school safe and secure.
Traditionally school districts have relied upon the mental health community or local police to keep schools safe, yet one of the key shortcomings has been the lack of a system that involves teachers, administrators, parents and students in the identification and communication process. Recently, colleges, universities and community colleges are forming Behavioral Intervention Teams with representatives from all these constituencies. Higher Education has changed their safety/security policies, procedures, or surveillance systems, yet K-12 have yet to incorporate Behavioral Intervention Teams. K-12 schools continue spending excessive amounts of money to put in place many of the physical security options. Sadly, they are reactionary only and do little to prevent aggression because they are designed exclusively to react to existing conflict, threat and violence. These schools reflect a national blindspot, which prefers hardening targets through enhanced security versus preventing violence with efforts directed at aggressors. Security gets all the focus and money, but this only makes us feel safe, rather than to actually make us safer.
Some law enforcement agencies use profiling as a means to identify an aggressor. According to the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education’s report on Targeted Violence in Schools, there is a significant difference between “profiling” and identifying and measuring emerging aggression; “The use of profiles is not effective either for identifying students who may pose a risk for targeted violence at school or – once a student has been identified – for assessing the risk that a particular student may pose for school-based targeted violence.” It continues; “An inquiry should focus instead on a student’s behaviors and communications to determine if the student appears to be planning or preparing for an attack.” We can and must assess objective, culturally neutral, identifiable criteria of emerging aggression.
For a comprehensive look at the problem and its solution, http://www.aggressionmanagement.com/White_Paper_K-12/
Continue the dialogue: http://aggressionmanagement.blogspot.com/