I have several drafts of blog posts but haven't felt like finishing them to publish. It all seems so futile. Parents don't listen, those in charge of school safety don't listen. So much has been learned about school safety in the last 2 decades.
I often think of this quote by Mary Ellen O'Toole (a former FBI agent, she consulted on the Columbine High School shooting as well as the shooting at Red Lake Minnesota and the mass school killings in Finland. Dr. O'Toole was the lead researcher and author of the FBI's seminal work in school violence, The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective).
“On the news, people are saying we should be concerned about this and that," and I thought, ‘We identified that 20 years ago. Did you not read this stuff 20 years ago?’ … It’s fatiguing. I just feel a sense of fatigue.”
One criminologist recently wrote "I am sitting on mountains of data and evidence-based solutions and I can’t give my help away. I had more interest in my work from the Canadian government (thankfully) after ONE mass casualty event than from the US after hundreds."
I know a good number of school safety experts, and people only contact them after an incident.
I often hear people say "There are no studies! The government cut funding for studies!" But that isn't true; there are more studies out there than you can shake the proverbial stick at. I'll post a number of them in the next few days. There are tons of books (I probably own nearly every nonfiction book on school shootings and school safety), articles, webinars, newsletters, and so on. People don't want to hear that; it's easier to claim there is nothing out there than to do the heavy lifting and do some real research. There's so much that I can't get to it all. After just over 2 decades, I have to stop and think--to what end do I pursue this research? People already don't read the books that exist, take a free webinar, talk to other parents about school safety, they don't bring up school safety at school board meetings--if they even attend a school board meeting... I've had a Board of Supervisors member tell me "For God's sake, give it a rest" when I cautioned a parents to make sure of something she was passing around as a safety feature was in fact a good idea--it seems that books and studies can't be read but a Facebook meme catches fire!
I haven't made a decision yet on whether to continue my research or not, to write a book or not. I feel like if I write the book I'll get it out of my system and can at least try to share the things I've learned. I hadn't planned on writing this post today until I read this article--maybe this is what it will take to get people interested in learning what each of us can do--as a parent, community member, teacher, every one of us. Teacher injured in Oxford school shooting shares story of trauma, change
Future blog posts will have those ideas and they are things I learned from the best research out there-studying the shootings that already have happened--what did the parents miss, what did the community miss, what did the schools miss. No one needs a study--just study the details of past shootings. It's the same methodology a researcher would use, but then researchers hide all that in highly technical terms that no one will take the time to read and understand. The information is freely available to anyone with a device that connects to the Internet!
