Although recent polls indicate that parents in the United States believe school officials and the educational community are expending the right amount of time, effort and funds to protect their students, there have been some worrisome isolated violent incidents at a number of schools in the past several years. In the following article, the principal of a Butte, Montana, elementary school that unexpectedly confronted such violence reflects upon how, in the aftermath of that unanticipated event, the healing began in Butte, and a local, regional and nationwide resolve ensued.

I was the principal of Margaret Leary Elementary School on April 11, 1994, when a 10-year-old brought a semi-automatic handgun to school and killed Jeremy Bullock, a fifth-grader. At the time, Jeremy was the youngest student to be murdered at a school in the United States.

The tragedy served as a terrible wakeup call, not only to our town of Butte, Montana, but also to the rest of the nation. After each subsequent fatal school-based shooting these past six years, communities have issued a common refrain: "We didn't think that could happen here."

In Butte, we were left wondering how a community could be nursed back to health after such a sudden and violent schoolyard calamity. We also needed to learn how secondary victims could receive caring support and long-term rehabilitation for post-traumatic stress.

We looked for solutions that would address the multifaceted problems wrought by the homicide and that would allow students, teachers and the entire school community to move on with our lives.

A Safety Team

Our school district's initial step was to create a school-based safety team. Consisting of teachers, counselors, parents, law enforcement officials, representatives of the county attorney's office and child service agencies, plus local clergymen, the team focused on crisis debriefing, monitoring children at risk of troubled behavior, and restoring the school to some measure of normality. This interagency group continues to meet on a weekly basis today, to discuss crisis procedures and operational safety.

We discovered that immediate crisis debriefing in the hours after a serious act of violence was an absolute necessity. Ideally, this debriefing should be conducted by someone trained in critical incidence work. In Butte, I filled that role, having been trained years earlier by Community Intervention, a Minnesota-based training organization that deals with crisis management.

I immediately gave notice to fellow team members that I needed assistance. More than 40 counselors, law enforcement officers and school board members responded from across Montana. Teachers and other school staffers needed first-hand information on how to deal with traumatized children and, more so, how to get the classroom back to normal as quickly as possible.

The tragedy propelled our community into action. Ultimately, these efforts gained national attention for our district. In April 1998, I was appointed to a presidential task force to study the causes of youth violence and to discuss preventive measures that could be shared with educators and others nationwide.

Analyzing Causes

The first meeting of the Presidential Task Force on Youth Violence, hosted by Attorney General Janet Reno, focused on analyzing the causes of violence in the schools. We raised three key questions:

• Is there a trend among recent school shootings?

• What can the federal government do to help schools deal with gun violence?

• What common factors have been present in the recent incidents?

Subsequently, we met with President Clinton and his Cabinet at the White House for a three-hour roundtable discussion, and presented our recommendation for U.S. Government funding of early prevention and intervention programs in schools. It became clear to me, quite quickly, that our leaders were beginning to understand the need for early intervention at the local level, as well as for after-school programs and other counseling and guidance services for students.

Federal Support

At the first White House Conference on School Safety, in October 1998, President Clinton announced his intention to place 100,000 teachers in kindergarten through third grade classrooms during the next seven years, and to provide $600 million to redesign and fund the U.S. Department of Education's Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Project. Teachers know that smaller class sizes are essential to a safe learning environment at this age.

Federal initiatives include a number of funded programs and policy directives that local school officials can apply to their own violence prevention plans:

• Enforcing zero tolerance for guns on school property by enacting state laws while promoting blended sentencing for juvenile offenders tried as adults. This is supported by educators and law enforcement agencies.

• Providing support for civic, community and religious organizations to initiate a values-based violence prevention initiative.

• Providing safe after-school opportunities to 500,000 children annually.

• Encouraging schools to deal forthrightly with truancy, and to adopt school uniform policies.

• Supporting local curfews.

• Developing a comprehensive anti-gang effort.

• Supporting stricter enforcement of laws to keep weapons away from children and for legislation that places child safety locking devices on guns.

• Providing more than $140 million to assist community coalitions in eliminating drugs, and combating youth alcohol and tobacco abuse.

In addition, the Clinton Administration has pledged to provide funding for early intervention, smaller class sizes, well-prepared teachers, replacement of deteriorating school facilities and expansion of after-school programs.

A Shared Experience

As a principal who witnessed the horror of school violence and shared the terrible experience of the loss of a child, I am honored, nonetheless, to be able to apply this experience to assist other educational leaders to improve school safety for all of our children nationwide.

----------

Reprinted with permission from the June 1999 issue of The School Administrator magazine.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government.