199th post
This is top-of-the-front-page story from today's Denver Post
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~54~2089839,00.html
Article Published: Sunday, April 18, 2004
Columbine: A recurring nightmare?
Five years after the worst school shooting incident in U.S. history, experts say it is likely to happen again
By Alicia Caldwell
Denver Post Staff Writer
After an unprecedented five- year push to better secure the nation's schools, security experts and education officials agree on a disquieting answer to the question: Could Columbine happen again?
Without a doubt.
photo caption: Police in Arvada keep a binder containing the Arvada Schools Emergency Operation Guide, but no one has the key to halting a motivated, determined youth with a grudge and a gun.
"To tell you the truth, Columbine, as horrible as it was, not only probably won't be the last, but it probably won't be the worst," said Glenn Stutzky, a Michigan State University instructor who is a school violence expert. "I think in the future we're going to find better-coordinated and -executed plans."
Five years ago Tuesday, two Columbine High School students perpetrated the largest mass slaying in the history of the nation's schools, killing 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide. Two dozen others were wounded.
School boards across the country responded by installing an array of security measures including metal detectors, surveillance cameras and more police in the hallways.
Today, the best available statistics show an uptick in school violence this year, which some say is an indication that all those locker searches and school crisis plans are no match for a kid with a gun and a grudge.
Those numbers, gathered by nonprofits and school security firms that largely monitor news reports, point to an increase in shootings, stabbings and other incidents in and near schools.
Though the problem is difficult to measure and explain, some security experts blame the apparent increase in violence on growing complacency and attempts to address human behavioral problems with simple security measures.
"By three years after Columbine, so much was being said about declining homicides," said James Garbarino, a Cornell University professor and author of several school violence books. "You heard more and more that 'it's over.' But there is much work to be done in making peace with the kids and changing the climate of schools."
Others worry that increased vigilance might translate into a return to the kind of policies that resulted in the suspension of an elementary school student in Arkansas who pointed a breaded chicken finger at a teacher and said, "Pow, pow, pow."
Current, precise statistics would help define and prescribe a response to the problem of school violence, but they are not available.
Critics point to a lack of a national school crime reporting mandate, and a two-year lag between the end of the school year and the U.S. Department of Education's release of school violence statistics.
Education officials contend that legislators would have no stomach for forcing educators to undertake such a task.
However, National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based consulting firm, has tracked 43 school-related violent deaths nationwide in the 2003-04 school year so far, which is more than the past two years combined.
"Clearly, without a doubt, there is a spike," said Kenneth Trump, the security firm's president. "It's rather pathetic that a private, nongovernmental entity has more updated information than the (U.S.) Department of Education."
And while Trump believes districts have taken significant steps to improve school safety, he senses a "been there, done that" mentality.
"The good news is that we're much better at preventing Columbine-like situations," Trump said. "The bad news is we're dealing with human nature and complacency."
These issues have left policy experts, parents and school leaders searching for the right balance when it comes to guarding children, disciplining them and hearing them out.
"It's alarming that we have spent quite a bit of money and time on safety efforts, and we're going backward," said Pam Riley, executive director of the National Association of Students Against Violence Everywhere, a Raleigh, N.C.-based group. "We have to balance those efforts with work on relationship issues. These are issues that can escalate into violence."
photo caption: Arvada police officer John Zubrinic, the school resource officer at Ralston Valley High School, takes notes while talking to students Thursday during a lunch period. After the Columbine massacre, more officers were placed in school hallways throughout the nation, but one firm has counted 43 school-related violent deaths this school year.
Precautions circumvented
Not long after the Columbine massacre, the people in the tiny town of Cold Spring, Minn., rolled up their sleeves and devised a plan they thought would protect their children.
"I remember a very large group of people sat down, and we hammered out what we thought was a fairly good plan," said Cold Spring Police Chief Phil Jones.
The plan included emergency response, surveillance cameras and school resource officers.
None of it was enough to stop 15-year- old freshman Jason McLaughlin, who police say pulled out a .22-caliber semiautomatic handgun from a gym bag at Rocori High School last fall and killed two fellow students.
"This is very difficult to say," Jones said. "The response itself went smoothly. But we still lost two kids."
The community of 2,975 was stunned.
"Everybody has been racking their brains, asking, What more could we do?" Jones said.
Cold Spring was far from the only town that looked inward after the horror that unfolded at Columbine in 1999.
"I believe every school district in this country went back and examined what they were doing in the way of school safety after Columbine," said Bill Modzeleski, an associate deputy undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Education.
The result was an increase in school security measures that included locker checks, metal detectors and more school resource officers.
And it seemed to work.
In the two years after Columbine, school violence declined significantly, according to federal statistics.
Surveys conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed decreases in the percentages of high school students who said they had been in a fight or carried a weapon on school property.
But there were overreactions as well.
"At first, the metal-detector business tried to reap a great profit from the incident," said John Peper, a former member the Columbine Review Commission, an independent panel that reviewed the shootings and the aftermath.
But Peper said parents largely rebelled at the notion that their children would be learning in a prison atmosphere.
Some school officials tried to develop a profile of who might be the next school shooter, Modzeleski said. Trench coats, worn by Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, were banned in districts around the country.
"After Columbine, there was a lot of discussion about how this was part of a trench coat mafia and schools around the country began saying, 'Let's look at kids wearing trench coats,"' he said.
photo caption: Joshua Magee is escorted to his arraignment last month in Lincoln, Neb., by juvenile detention worker Tina Dingman. Wearing a black trench coat similar to those worn by the Columbine killers, Magee was arrested at his school in Malcolm after a friend alerted authorities to his intentions. Magee’s car contained a rifle and about 20 homemade bombs.
Trench coat profiling proved not to be useful, Modzeleski said. Clothes simply didn't predict behavior.
Sometimes crackdown efforts veered into what some call abuses.
In 2002, a 16-year-old award-winning swimmer at a Texas high school was kicked out of school for a year after a security guard found a bread knife in the bed of his truck.
The teen said the knife likely fell out of a box of his grandmother's belongings that he was hauling to Goodwill. He appealed and eventually got the expulsion overturned.
Those who monitor student rights and zero-tolerance abuses point to Columbine as a watershed event.
"There are a lot of kids who are experiencing the effects of post-Columbine policies," said Ruth Lowenkron, senior attorney for the student rights project at the Education Law Center, based in Newark, N.J.
Many school policies were passed "sheerly out of fear" after Columbine, said Anjuli Verma, a public education coordinator at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Verma pointed to a recent drug raid at a high school about 30 minutes outside Charleston, S.C. She attributed the "criminal, adult police tactics" used at Stratford High School to post-Columbine overreaction.
Carl Alexander agrees it was an overreaction. The 15-year-old had never been near a gun before. He said he was standing in the hall of his high school when armed law enforcement officers burst in the door.
Students were told to lie on the floor. Some were restrained with plastic ties. A dog sniffed and shook their book bags.
This, they were told, was a search for illegal drugs.
In the end, no drugs were found and the November incident created a world of bad feelings among students who felt a zero-tolerance attitude was responsible for turning a rumor into a raid.
"Nobody should have to go through something like that," said Alexander, a freshman. "We're just kids. We're not criminals."
photo caption: Dan Johnson cuts an imposing silhouette as a district resource officer Tuesday at Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Wash. Spokane Public Schools overhauled security after 15 people died in the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999.
Echo of Columbine in Nebraska
The incident in Malcolm, Neb., last month was hauntingly similar to Columbine.
An agitated 17-year-old boy wearing a black trench coat paced outside his high school. His car carried a bolt-action rifle and about 20 gasoline cans and propane bottles fitted with crude fuses.
But in this case, a friend of Joshua Magee's told school administrators, who immediately called authorities and locked down the school. No one was injured, and Magee was arrested at the school.
Those who know him say he was mercilessly taunted, mocked and ostracized from childhood.
"To be singled out and excluded and tormented and to be made to feel he was 'not OK,' I think, took a toll on his personality and his sense of self," said Catherine Kapke, whose son was a close friend of Magee's. "He didn't know how to be anymore. By the time fifth grade came along, he learned to push it down and not cry about it anymore."
Further complicating Magee's life, according to published reports, was mental illness, rejection by a girl he liked and the departure of his father, who was in the military.
According to a U.S. Secret Service study that examined 37 school shootings, more than two-thirds of attackers felt persecuted by others. Three-quarters had a grievance at the time of the attack, and half had revenge as a motive.
And while not every child pushed around in school is going to exact violent revenge, the abusive treatment of students by their peers is recognized as not only a widespread problem but a dangerous one.
"I don't think we yet, in the adult community, appreciate the incredible pain that this sort of behavior inflicts on kids," said Stutzky, the Michigan State University instructor.
Stutzky said that in his travels around the country, visiting schools and talking to students since Columbine, several things have become clear.
The quick-fix security measures involving hardware largely don't work. Students need to have a trusting relationship with an adult at school. And civility and kindness need to become a priority at schools.
"It's not that we need a new program or a new curriculum," he said. "We need to change the social fabric of the school."
The culture that exists, he said, provides "the soil for future violent events to be planted in."
Modzeleski, of the Department of Education, said the federal government is directing resources to those kinds of programs. Another effort underway, he said, is a "bystander study."
The Secret Service report asserts that in three-quarters of the school homicides examined, the attacker told someone about the planned attack, and in nearly all cases that person was a peer - a friend, a schoolmate or a sibling. They almost never told an adult.
As Stutzky has examined school shooting plots that have been thwarted, he has realized that the attackers, almost always male students, are crafting more sophisticated plans.
Schools need to be better staffed so that adults have the time to listen to students and gain their trust.
"Columbine happened despite security measures that included guards and cameras," said James Fox, a Northeastern University professor who has written extensively on juvenile criminal behavior.
"Certainly, it could happen again."
This is top-of-the-front-page story from today's Denver Post
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~54~2089839,00.html
Article Published: Sunday, April 18, 2004
Columbine: A recurring nightmare?
Five years after the worst school shooting incident in U.S. history, experts say it is likely to happen again
By Alicia Caldwell
Denver Post Staff Writer
After an unprecedented five- year push to better secure the nation's schools, security experts and education officials agree on a disquieting answer to the question: Could Columbine happen again?
Without a doubt.
photo caption: Police in Arvada keep a binder containing the Arvada Schools Emergency Operation Guide, but no one has the key to halting a motivated, determined youth with a grudge and a gun.
"To tell you the truth, Columbine, as horrible as it was, not only probably won't be the last, but it probably won't be the worst," said Glenn Stutzky, a Michigan State University instructor who is a school violence expert. "I think in the future we're going to find better-coordinated and -executed plans."
Five years ago Tuesday, two Columbine High School students perpetrated the largest mass slaying in the history of the nation's schools, killing 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide. Two dozen others were wounded.
School boards across the country responded by installing an array of security measures including metal detectors, surveillance cameras and more police in the hallways.
Today, the best available statistics show an uptick in school violence this year, which some say is an indication that all those locker searches and school crisis plans are no match for a kid with a gun and a grudge.
Those numbers, gathered by nonprofits and school security firms that largely monitor news reports, point to an increase in shootings, stabbings and other incidents in and near schools.
Though the problem is difficult to measure and explain, some security experts blame the apparent increase in violence on growing complacency and attempts to address human behavioral problems with simple security measures.
"By three years after Columbine, so much was being said about declining homicides," said James Garbarino, a Cornell University professor and author of several school violence books. "You heard more and more that 'it's over.' But there is much work to be done in making peace with the kids and changing the climate of schools."
Others worry that increased vigilance might translate into a return to the kind of policies that resulted in the suspension of an elementary school student in Arkansas who pointed a breaded chicken finger at a teacher and said, "Pow, pow, pow."
Current, precise statistics would help define and prescribe a response to the problem of school violence, but they are not available.
Critics point to a lack of a national school crime reporting mandate, and a two-year lag between the end of the school year and the U.S. Department of Education's release of school violence statistics.
Education officials contend that legislators would have no stomach for forcing educators to undertake such a task.
However, National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based consulting firm, has tracked 43 school-related violent deaths nationwide in the 2003-04 school year so far, which is more than the past two years combined.
"Clearly, without a doubt, there is a spike," said Kenneth Trump, the security firm's president. "It's rather pathetic that a private, nongovernmental entity has more updated information than the (U.S.) Department of Education."
And while Trump believes districts have taken significant steps to improve school safety, he senses a "been there, done that" mentality.
"The good news is that we're much better at preventing Columbine-like situations," Trump said. "The bad news is we're dealing with human nature and complacency."
These issues have left policy experts, parents and school leaders searching for the right balance when it comes to guarding children, disciplining them and hearing them out.
"It's alarming that we have spent quite a bit of money and time on safety efforts, and we're going backward," said Pam Riley, executive director of the National Association of Students Against Violence Everywhere, a Raleigh, N.C.-based group. "We have to balance those efforts with work on relationship issues. These are issues that can escalate into violence."
photo caption: Arvada police officer John Zubrinic, the school resource officer at Ralston Valley High School, takes notes while talking to students Thursday during a lunch period. After the Columbine massacre, more officers were placed in school hallways throughout the nation, but one firm has counted 43 school-related violent deaths this school year.
Precautions circumvented
Not long after the Columbine massacre, the people in the tiny town of Cold Spring, Minn., rolled up their sleeves and devised a plan they thought would protect their children.
"I remember a very large group of people sat down, and we hammered out what we thought was a fairly good plan," said Cold Spring Police Chief Phil Jones.
The plan included emergency response, surveillance cameras and school resource officers.
None of it was enough to stop 15-year- old freshman Jason McLaughlin, who police say pulled out a .22-caliber semiautomatic handgun from a gym bag at Rocori High School last fall and killed two fellow students.
"This is very difficult to say," Jones said. "The response itself went smoothly. But we still lost two kids."
The community of 2,975 was stunned.
"Everybody has been racking their brains, asking, What more could we do?" Jones said.
Cold Spring was far from the only town that looked inward after the horror that unfolded at Columbine in 1999.
"I believe every school district in this country went back and examined what they were doing in the way of school safety after Columbine," said Bill Modzeleski, an associate deputy undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Education.
The result was an increase in school security measures that included locker checks, metal detectors and more school resource officers.
And it seemed to work.
In the two years after Columbine, school violence declined significantly, according to federal statistics.
Surveys conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed decreases in the percentages of high school students who said they had been in a fight or carried a weapon on school property.
But there were overreactions as well.
"At first, the metal-detector business tried to reap a great profit from the incident," said John Peper, a former member the Columbine Review Commission, an independent panel that reviewed the shootings and the aftermath.
But Peper said parents largely rebelled at the notion that their children would be learning in a prison atmosphere.
Some school officials tried to develop a profile of who might be the next school shooter, Modzeleski said. Trench coats, worn by Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, were banned in districts around the country.
"After Columbine, there was a lot of discussion about how this was part of a trench coat mafia and schools around the country began saying, 'Let's look at kids wearing trench coats,"' he said.
photo caption: Joshua Magee is escorted to his arraignment last month in Lincoln, Neb., by juvenile detention worker Tina Dingman. Wearing a black trench coat similar to those worn by the Columbine killers, Magee was arrested at his school in Malcolm after a friend alerted authorities to his intentions. Magee’s car contained a rifle and about 20 homemade bombs.
Trench coat profiling proved not to be useful, Modzeleski said. Clothes simply didn't predict behavior.
Sometimes crackdown efforts veered into what some call abuses.
In 2002, a 16-year-old award-winning swimmer at a Texas high school was kicked out of school for a year after a security guard found a bread knife in the bed of his truck.
The teen said the knife likely fell out of a box of his grandmother's belongings that he was hauling to Goodwill. He appealed and eventually got the expulsion overturned.
Those who monitor student rights and zero-tolerance abuses point to Columbine as a watershed event.
"There are a lot of kids who are experiencing the effects of post-Columbine policies," said Ruth Lowenkron, senior attorney for the student rights project at the Education Law Center, based in Newark, N.J.
Many school policies were passed "sheerly out of fear" after Columbine, said Anjuli Verma, a public education coordinator at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Verma pointed to a recent drug raid at a high school about 30 minutes outside Charleston, S.C. She attributed the "criminal, adult police tactics" used at Stratford High School to post-Columbine overreaction.
Carl Alexander agrees it was an overreaction. The 15-year-old had never been near a gun before. He said he was standing in the hall of his high school when armed law enforcement officers burst in the door.
Students were told to lie on the floor. Some were restrained with plastic ties. A dog sniffed and shook their book bags.
This, they were told, was a search for illegal drugs.
In the end, no drugs were found and the November incident created a world of bad feelings among students who felt a zero-tolerance attitude was responsible for turning a rumor into a raid.
"Nobody should have to go through something like that," said Alexander, a freshman. "We're just kids. We're not criminals."
photo caption: Dan Johnson cuts an imposing silhouette as a district resource officer Tuesday at Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Wash. Spokane Public Schools overhauled security after 15 people died in the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999.
Echo of Columbine in Nebraska
The incident in Malcolm, Neb., last month was hauntingly similar to Columbine.
An agitated 17-year-old boy wearing a black trench coat paced outside his high school. His car carried a bolt-action rifle and about 20 gasoline cans and propane bottles fitted with crude fuses.
But in this case, a friend of Joshua Magee's told school administrators, who immediately called authorities and locked down the school. No one was injured, and Magee was arrested at the school.
Those who know him say he was mercilessly taunted, mocked and ostracized from childhood.
"To be singled out and excluded and tormented and to be made to feel he was 'not OK,' I think, took a toll on his personality and his sense of self," said Catherine Kapke, whose son was a close friend of Magee's. "He didn't know how to be anymore. By the time fifth grade came along, he learned to push it down and not cry about it anymore."
Further complicating Magee's life, according to published reports, was mental illness, rejection by a girl he liked and the departure of his father, who was in the military.
According to a U.S. Secret Service study that examined 37 school shootings, more than two-thirds of attackers felt persecuted by others. Three-quarters had a grievance at the time of the attack, and half had revenge as a motive.
And while not every child pushed around in school is going to exact violent revenge, the abusive treatment of students by their peers is recognized as not only a widespread problem but a dangerous one.
"I don't think we yet, in the adult community, appreciate the incredible pain that this sort of behavior inflicts on kids," said Stutzky, the Michigan State University instructor.
Stutzky said that in his travels around the country, visiting schools and talking to students since Columbine, several things have become clear.
The quick-fix security measures involving hardware largely don't work. Students need to have a trusting relationship with an adult at school. And civility and kindness need to become a priority at schools.
"It's not that we need a new program or a new curriculum," he said. "We need to change the social fabric of the school."
The culture that exists, he said, provides "the soil for future violent events to be planted in."
Modzeleski, of the Department of Education, said the federal government is directing resources to those kinds of programs. Another effort underway, he said, is a "bystander study."
The Secret Service report asserts that in three-quarters of the school homicides examined, the attacker told someone about the planned attack, and in nearly all cases that person was a peer - a friend, a schoolmate or a sibling. They almost never told an adult.
As Stutzky has examined school shooting plots that have been thwarted, he has realized that the attackers, almost always male students, are crafting more sophisticated plans.
Schools need to be better staffed so that adults have the time to listen to students and gain their trust.
"Columbine happened despite security measures that included guards and cameras," said James Fox, a Northeastern University professor who has written extensively on juvenile criminal behavior.
"Certainly, it could happen again."
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