Dialogue around school violence

We had an emergency committee meeting in my school, yesterday, where we talked about what to do in case of an intruder emergency. We're relatively prepared, but not prepared enough that I feel secure should someone come into the building with the intent and the weaponry to do harm.

I studied school violence in grad school. Rob Horner is the name, I believe, of the special education/developmental psychology scholar out of Oregon whose work in this area so impressed me. I also bought a book I'm trying to track down from a friend I lent it to written by a Harvard policy researcher, I believe, about how schools and communities have dealt with school shootings in their communities.

The solutions are not as simple as security measures, though these are very important and something I'm intimately involved with here at Eisenhower. The solutions involve the way we relate with one another, with students, with families, with people in the community, and the ways that those interactions either strengthen people and the community or leave people alienated, scared, and willing to do something drastic to act out those dark impulses. Schools are not to blame for these tragedies. But there is much they can do to be more responsible for making them less likely.

The recent spate of school violence is surely something that we can come together around, as a nation, engage in the national sharing of ideas that the Administration is initiating, and come together around the common ground of keeping our children safe.

If there was any domestic issue, right now, that I wish we had dedicated people like Brandi Fisher or Theo Brown or Carolyn Lukensmeyer working to initiate dialogue on, this is the one, right now.

We've started the discussion at my school. I hope the nation takes seriously the need to rally together around this banner to make our schools and communities more genuinely safe.

Love,
Ben