One article: A Disturbing New Book About The Columbine Massacre Asks: Do You Know Who Your Children Are?
Newsweek essay that mentions book: The Columbine Generation
Story at EarlyWord: Views of ‘Columbine’
One article: A Disturbing New Book About The Columbine Massacre Asks: Do You Know Who Your Children Are?
Newsweek essay that mentions book: The Columbine Generation
Story at EarlyWord: Views of ‘Columbine’
Columbine, What are we doing to prevent it?
Research has determined that from the Moment of Commitment (the point when a student pulls their weapon) to the Moment of Completion (when the last round is fired) is only 5 seconds. If it is the intent of a school district to react to this violence, they will do so over the wounded and/or slain bodies of students, teachers and administrators.
Educational institutions clearly want safe and secure schools. Administrators are perennially queried by parents about the safety of their schools. The commonplace answers, intended to reassure anxious parents, focus on the school resource officers and emergency procedures. While useful, these less than adequate efforts do not begin to provide a definitive answer to preventing school violence, nor do they make a school safe and secure.
Traditionally school districts have relied upon the mental health community or local police to keep schools safe, yet one of the key shortcomings has been the lack of a system that involves teachers, administrators, parents and students in the identification and communication process. Recently, colleges, universities and community colleges are forming Behavioral Intervention Teams with representatives from all these constituencies. Higher Education has changed their safety/security policies, procedures, or surveillance systems, yet K-12 have yet to incorporate Behavioral Intervention Teams. K-12 schools continue spending excessive amounts of money to put in place many of the physical security options. Sadly, they are reactionary only and do little to prevent aggression because they are designed exclusively to react to existing conflict, threat and violence. These schools reflect a national blindspot, which prefers hardening targets through enhanced security versus preventing violence with efforts directed at aggressors. Security gets all the focus and money, but this only makes us feel safe, rather than to actually make us safer.
Some law enforcement agencies use profiling as a means to identify an aggressor. According to the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education’s report on Targeted Violence in Schools, there is a significant difference between “profiling” and identifying and measuring emerging aggression; “The use of profiles is not effective either for identifying students who may pose a risk for targeted violence at school or – once a student has been identified – for assessing the risk that a particular student may pose for school-based targeted violence.” It continues; “An inquiry should focus instead on a student’s behaviors and communications to determine if the student appears to be planning or preparing for an attack.” We can and must assess objective, culturally neutral, identifiable criteria of emerging aggression.
For a comprehensive look at the problem and its solution, http://www.aggressionmanagement.com/White_Paper_K-12/
Columbine
Whose fault was the killings at Columbine High School? And how can we help our children resist bullies, not become bullies themselves and thrive after horrible killings?
Seven of the most common targets of blame are:
1. The bullies who pushed Harris and Klebolt over the edge.
2. The parents of the bullies who didn’t stop their children.
3. The school principal who didn’t stop the bullying of Harris and Klebolt, or stop the earlier violence of the killers.
4. The parents of the killers who didn’t raise their kids better and didn’t had them incarcerated or committed.
5. Harris and Klebolt were simply psychopathic, psychotic killers.
6. A society that is violent and corrupt.
7. A society that has lost its connection with God.
Looking to blame and then fix one part of human life is the wrong way to go. Our efforts to change our school and legal system are necessary, useful and laudable, but they’re not a solution that will prevent future massacres.
Face reality. Bullies, psychopaths and killers are like the weather – they’ve always been with us and always will be. Assigning blame won’t change that.
The useful question for us is how we prepare our children and teenagers for a world in which they’ll face crazy, violent people.
We must teach our children not to use bullying tactics, and to be resilient in the face of bullying and to learn how to stop bullies in their tracks. Obviously, Harris and Klebolt never learned this. The hardest task for parents is to recognize when our children have gone bad and to do something about it.
Answering these difficult questions will help us teach our children better than hand wringing or assigning blame.
Disclosure: In addition to having six children and living in Denver, I’m a practical, pragmatic coach and consultant. I’ve written books of case studies, “Parenting Bully-Proof Kids” and “How to Stop Bullies in their Tracks.” Check out my website and blog at BulliesBeGone (http://BulliesBeGone.com).
Columbine
According to a news item I read just last week, all the stuff we were told (yes, by the media) about these deranged kids was wrong. They weren’t bullied, but they must have launched an entire anti-bullying workshop industry.
Why we tolerate violence on the hi-ways for teens but raise the panic level about schools and the military, I don’t know. 6,000 teens a year could be saved (and that’s not counting the life changing injuries) just by raising the driving age to 18. If you are the parent, a dead child is a dead child, whether someone shot him, a virus took him down, he drank too much at a party, or got in the car with a friend who couldn’t control the car at high speed.