Uncle Bubba doesn’t like to get too current with his current events since the world is filled with hate and bad news and he definitely doesn’t want to contribute to it. So this is a post that may help in shedding some light on a dark subject; one that seems to have our political "leaders” stumped though there are smart people with viable answers. Our topic is the once unheard of occurrence of school shootings. Uncle Bubba felt compelled to get this information out there due to a recent headline in the local newspaper: “Making An Impact”. It was a typical, political fluff piece about how wonderful our local Sheriff (and Sheriff’s office) is. Among other things, in the wake of the recent shootings, he proposes to hire 10 new officers to protect the county middle and high schools. The school board had proposed to hire 5 but the sheriff, as a political monster’s nature is, wants 10. The board offered to pay just more than $82,000 to cover half the cost of those five additional officers for the rest of this school year. And where do they get that money from? The sheriff's office would pay the other half. Uncle Bubba wonders what criteria the Sheriff and school board used to come up with their solutions?
"There are associated upfront costs that no matter what we do, we must have the upfront cost covered," the Sheriff said. "That's purchasing the vehicles, the uniforms, the equipment, the weapons, doing the mandatory training as mandated by Florida statute to deploy these assets out into the communities."
To help cover those costs, the sheriff says he has asked county commissioners for a budget amendment of $978,000 for the rest of his current fiscal year… uh, Sheriff? That’s taxpayers' money. With that in mind, Uncle Bubba asks you to read the following excerpt from a podcast called Brain Stuff.
“On Valentine’s Day this year, 17 people including students and teachers were killed by a 19-year-old former student at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas that was high school in Parkland Florida. This was the tenth mass school shooting in the United States in the past five years. A mass shooting is generally defined as one when at least four people are killed in a single incident. And, once again, Americans are left asking ourselves why? Lost in the noisy debate over gun control and mental health screening is another compounding question; why schools? Why do so many troubled young man see schools as a place to act out there violent and vengeful fantasies? And what if anything can a school do to avoid becoming the next Columbine, Sandy Hook, or Stoneman Douglas? We spoke with Bryan Warnick, a Professor of Educational Ethics and Policy at the Ohio State University who co-authored a paper on the meaning and motivations behind targeted school shootings. Even though many associate gun violence in America with poor inner-city communities, many school shootings almost always occur at upper-middle-class suburban schools. That’s where the status tournament takes place explains Warnick. He said suburban schools do a lot of things to select winners and losers in ways that go beyond academics; think the adulation of athletics and the crownings of homecoming kings and queens. He continued, the way we see it, when schools set themselves up as judges in the social status tournament the resentment will sometimes be directed against the school itself.
In the book, 'Hollywood Goes To The Movies' sociologist and author Robert Bulman says that while Hollywood films that in urban schools focus on heroic teachers and academic achievement, films set in suburban settings focus on student journeys of self-discovery. In the same vein, many suburban school shooters see what they are doing is acts of self-expression.
Warnick said there’s a different value system at play in suburban schools, it’s called expressive individualism. What we see in movies and TV is students engaged in the process of self-discovery, breaking through norms of the school, breaking through social cliques. Discovery and individual expression aren’t necessarily bad things says Warnick, but for certain troubled young man who harbor deep resentment of the system that rejected them, there’s no better way to express their true tortured selves than through a dramatic act of violence and the higher the body count to be more powerful the message will be.
We also spoke with Cheryl Johnson, a Professor of Criminal Justice at Cincinnati’s Xavier University where she studied whether increased security measures, namely armed guards on campus, locked down buildings, and metal detectors are an effective means of preventing school shootings. She found that although beefed up security may deter overall crime and violent crime in schools there’s little evidence to show that those measures alone thwart a mass shooting. First, school shootings are just too statistically rare to gauge the efficacy of different security methods. And second, there’s antidotal evidence that even the best security can fail.
There were armed school guards at Columbine. The Sandy Hook shooter shot through glass pans to bypass locked doors. And in 2005, a student in Red Lake Minnesota passed through his schools metal detector before killing an unarmed guard who tried to stop him, along with other people including himself. There’s also concerned militarizing schools with armed guards and security checkpoints contribute to the idea that the school is an unsafe place where violence is almost expected. Johnson 2017 paper, obviously written before the February 2018 Parkland instant, pointed out that the raw number of homicides at schools each year since Columbine in 1999 had actually decreased or remain stable over the years.
One of the best ways to prevent school shootings, both Johnson and Warnick agree, is to encourage people to speak up when they suspect a classmate friend or family member is contemplating something terrible. The day before the Parkland shooting a grandmother in Washington state called 911 when she found her 18-year-old grandson’s handwritten plans for a gruesome school attack involving homemade explosives.
Johnson said, 'That’s a school shooting we’re not talking about today.' Citing a report from the Secret Service and the Department of Education, that in 81% of school shootings at least one other person knew about the plans. In 59%, two or more people had information about the attacks before they occurred. Warnick said, 'Usually when school shootings are prevented its when students trust the teachers enough to share that information with them. If we could really build up schools as a place of the trust, where children feel like they had adults you care about them, that would facilitate the communication that’s been proven to prevent school shootings.'
Of course, speaking of hasn’t always been foolproof. We now know that the FBI received a tip about the Parkland shooter dating back to September 2017 for making disturbing comments on YouTube, but he was never detained or even questioned. A second person contacted the FBI on January 5, 2018, to report their concerns and to warn them about the shooter’s guns and desire to kill. But the FBI has admitted that the proper protocols to follow up were left unfollowed.
Instead of school Districts spending money on expensive and unproven security solutions Bryan Warnick suggests they hire more teachers and counselors to shrink class-sizes and encourage more meaningful interactions between staff and struggling students. He’d also like to see more creative outlets like art, literature, and music classes which often get cut from tight budget for safe individual expression."
In Bubbie's view, if the county is going to spend $1,060,000.00 it should be on Warnick and Johnson's suggestions above. In other words, spend it on the children and not to inflate the size of peripheral local government agencies.
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