At the Crossroads in Pocatello
At the Crossroads in Pocatello
An eastern Idaho district uses school-based supports to address gang violence, drug and alcohol addiction, and a tragic murder involving three high school students.
POCATELLO, Idaho—If you were one of the estimated 34 million people driving the nation’s interstates this past 4th of July holiday—and you had your radio tuned to National Public Radio—you may have heard reporter Noah Adams’ story about Pocatello. “Pokey,” as locals affectionately call it, is home to Idaho State University and has approximately 52,000 residents, making it the largest city in sparsely populated Eastern Idaho. But as Adams pointed out, it’s also located at the confluence of Interstate 15, which runs north to south from the Canadian border all the way to San Diego, and Interstate 86, which becomes the main route west to Oregon and Washington. Every year, thousands of people skirt the edges of the city, headed to Boise, Salt Lake City, Yellowstone National Park, and points beyond. Relatively few of those travelers, however, actually slow down, get off the interstate, and explore Pocatello.
Adams did just that, and although his story stayed lighthearted and positive it also hinted that the town is at a crossroads in more ways than one. “Pocatello is one of the last well-kept secrets in the West,” the owner of a local brewpub told Adams. But she also added that many people would like to keep it that way.
It was a telling statement. In the past decade more and more people have gotten in on the secret. As a state, Idaho grew by 13.3 percent between 2000 and 2006, twice the national average. Although Pocatello’s growth has been much slower than places like Boise and Coeur D’Alene, it too has felt the repercussions of the statewide boom, registering a double digit growth percentage between 1990 and 2000, according to the U.S. Census.
Not all of that growth, or the problems associated with it, has been welcome. Besides rising housing prices and sprawling development that threatens to eat up the countryside, Pocatello has been hit with issues usually associated with much larger cities. According to police, gang activity is on the rise and is directly connected to larger gangs in Salt Lake City and Ogden to the south; the Nampa-Caldwell-Boise area to the west; and the Fort Hall Indian Reservation to the north—a less positive outcome of Pocatello’s crossroads location. A decades-long problem with methamphetamine addiction also reveals a dark side not obvious to the casual visitor.
But it would be easy to overstate the case. Pocatello remains a livable, affordable, friendly, and surprisingly cultured town—a magnet for those who appreciate both easy access to hiking trails and a good wine list. That’s the well-kept secret. And yet, gangs, drug abuse, and violence can’t be ignored, especially when they spill into the local public schools.
In fact, as Adams’ story played on the radio, the town was still reeling from a horrific murder that 10 months earlier had brought national media attention of a different kind. And at the center of that story were three 16-year-old juniors at Pocatello High School.
Shaken to Its Core
On Friday, September 22, 2006, Cassie Jo Stoddart was house sitting for relatives near Chubbuck, a small community just north of Pocatello. Matt Beckham, her boyfriend, came by that evening to hang out and watch movies. Two other classmates, Torey Adamcik and Brian Draper, also stopped by to hang out, but left about 9:30 p.m. Beckham’s mother refused to let him stay the night and drove out to pick him up a short time later. As it turned out, her good judgment may have saved her son’s life.
Inspired by the Columbine shooting as well as violent movies and video games, Adamcik and Draper had been secretly planning to murder fellow students. They had made a “hit list,” and Stoddart and Beckham were inexplicably at the top of the list, despite the fact that the four were friends. Adamcik and Draper had also made a videotape that would later be used as the most damning evidence against them. In the video Adamcik can be heard saying, “I think a perfect ending would be a school shooting.”
A school shooting never happened, but when Stoddart’s relatives returned home on Sunday the 24th they found her body. She had been stabbed nearly two dozen times.
With Beckham’s help, police quickly traced Adamcik and Draper to the murder and persuaded Draper to lead them to the spot in nearby Blackrock Canyon where the two had buried evidence—hunting knives, clothing, and the videotape.
News of the murder stunned the entire community, and as the details came out it became even more disturbing. The fact that two seemingly normal, average students had murdered a fellow student was bad enough. The fact that they had planned it well in advance—had even videotaped themselves planning it—and that it was to be the first in a series of murders that might have ended in a school shooting, was beyond belief. “It just shocked us all,” says Gloria Stoker, a counselor at the school. “There were no indicators. Nothing. It would have been impossible to see this coming.”
In the immediate aftermath, school officials brought in extra counselors from other schools in the district, but according to Stoker, students preferred to talk to the counselors they already knew or to share their emotions with friends. “Kids tend to go places where they’re comfortable,” says Stoker. “In several cases we offered to be a support for a group of friends because they tended to band together in groups and console one another. We just let them know that if they wanted an adult there or if something came up that they wanted an adult perspective on, we were there.”
With the school year only a few weeks old, the school, the town, and the broader Portneuf Valley community were badly shaken. Five hundred people packed into St. Anthony’s Catholic Church for Stoddart’s funeral. A candlelight vigil was held at the “spirit rock” in front of the school, and a memorial to Stoddart stayed up for weeks. An editor of the local newspaper, the Idaho State Journal, wrote that the area was “shaken to its core,” and that the murder and its circumstances “[had] to be considered a sign that there is a cancer, however small, among our youth.”
The tragedy cast a long shadow over the entire 2006-2007 school year. Adamcik and Draper were each charged with first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Events leading up to their trials—eventually held separately because each claimed the other was responsible—would drag out through the winter and into spring. Draper was convicted on both counts on April 17; Adamcik on June 8, only a few days after Pocatello High’s 2007 graduation ceremony. On August 24, 2007, both were sentenced to life in prison without parole.
School-Based Support
For Pocatello High’s students and staff, the incident led to much soul searching. Some questioned how the culture at the school might have contributed to the murder. Were Adamcik and Draper themselves the victims of bullying and harassment? The same newspaper editorial that posited a “cancer” among local youth also asked openly: “Are we heading down the path to becoming the next Columbine?” A collective disbelief seemed to be in the air: What went wrong? How could this happen here?
“Anytime you have a murder, especially of this type, you say ’whoa, what’s going on here?’” says John Raukar, a veteran administrator and former director of safe and drug-free schools for the Pocatello School District. “This was a real wake-up call for Pocatello.”
Raukar, whose background includes stints as a school administrator in Tucson, Arizona, and the Chicago area, as well as six years as a clinical director of substance abuse for a Pocatello hospital, sees the incident in broader terms. “This is not unique to Pocatello,” he says. “This is a national issue. What we’re seeing is that kids, in some cases, are desensitized to violent, aggressive behavior and what it can lead to. They don’t appear to think they have any degree of vulnerability. It’s like they’re bulletproof. They act as if the real world was some sort of video game.”
If the issue is national, however, the school’s response to it has been to stick close to home. School-based supports have long been one of the Pocatello School District’s strengths, according to Matt McCarter, coordinator of the Idaho State Department of Education’s Safe and Drug-Free Schools program. “They have support programs at every grade level and at every school,” he says, “and they’ve had a lot of success with that. It’s an approach that tends to be a lot more personal, more one-on-one, and at the same time encourages students to take ownership of the issues at their school and of their own behavior.”
One such program, called At-Risk Trackers, has been implemented at all middle and high schools in the district during the past two years. Each school has a full-time “tracker,” paid for with Safe and Drug-Free Schools funds. Trackers work with 25 to 40 students at any given time. Those students have demonstrated at-risk behaviors, and the trackers’ job is to make one-on-one contact with each of them on an almost daily basis. “We want to make sure that the students, first and foremost, follow the rules,” says Raukar, “and second, that they’re involved in constructive educational activities while in their classes. It’s a proactive approach. Rather than just punish them for bad behavior we want to give these at-risk students extra support.”
The program has been working “very, very well,” according to Raukar, and will be expanded to elementary schools in the near future.
Conflict Managers is another school-based support program funded by Safe and Drug-Free Schools money and already in place at every elementary school in the district. Conflict managers are recruited from existing staff—typically counselors—who are offered a small stipend to take on additional responsibilities. Similar to at-risk trackers, conflict managers work directly with any student who has shown at-risk or “inordinate” behavior. The program specifically focuses on issues such as bullying and harassment. Besides working one-on-one with students, the managers also provide staff training and make presentations to students.
In recent years, conflict managers have noticed a rise in online bullying and harassment and have taken steps to address those issues. “We’ve seen that at the elementary level more than the secondary level, which is surprising,” says Raukar. “Even though it might occur outside of school time, if it affects a student’s educational experience, we try to address it. Our goal is to create a safe school environment and sometimes that means addressing all kinds of issues that are happening off campus.”
The Natural Helpers program, a nationally popular school-based support that has been in place in the Pocatello School District’s middle and high schools for more than two decades, also finds itself dealing with off-campus issues. Stoker, who was the Natural Helper coordinator at Pocatello High School for two years, says the program is about helping friends help friends. “We draw on the resources of our students,” she says, “because that’s where kids typically go—they go to their friends when they need help.”
Each fall the coordinator chooses a new group of approximately 25 student recruits, often based on a student questionnaire. “We’re looking for kids from all different demographics and subgroups,” says Stoker. “It isn’t about a popularity contest. It’s about finding students that have shown good judgment and the ability to relate to their peers.”
Students typically serve as natural helpers for the remainder of their time at a middle or high school. On average, there are 75 helpers at Pocatello High in a given school year.
Each fall the natural helpers attend a three-day training retreat to develop skills and learn how to deal with specific situations. “We spend quite a bit of time on the fact that, sometimes, you have to get outside help,” says Stoker. “Sometimes a friend will tell you about a problem and it’s bigger than you can handle and you’ve got to tell a professional in order to get the right help.”
Some of the problems that natural helpers have brought to light at Pocatello High, for example, include abuse at home, eating disorders, drug or alcohol abuse, and suicidal behavior. “The very best scenario,” says Stoker, “is that the natural helper will bring the student having the problem in with them. We really work with the helpers on that, and it does happen the majority of the time.”
In addition to these school-based supports, the district has invested a large percentage of its Safe and Drug-Free Schools money into educational programming for staff, parents, and students. In recent years the focus of that programming has been on gangs, violence, and drug-and-alcohol awareness. Raukar has served not only as the Region Six coordinator (which includes Pocatello and the surrounding area), but also as the state contractor for all gang and drug-related programs.
The state’s well-documented meth problem has become a major focus of the statewide program. Using tobacco tax funds, the Idaho legislature funded a variety of programs to be coordinated by a new “drug czar” at the state department. One program, the Idaho Meth Project, is based on a similar approach that has had success in Montana. The project includes advertising, K-12 educational programming, and other prevention and treatment programs.
Raukar, along with his training partner, retired detective Howard Manwaring, has been gaining a lot of attention for his hard-hitting, informative trainings on meth addiction, as well as gangs and violence. Requests for trainings have come from across the state and as far away as Nevada and Arizona. “We don’t pull any punches,” Raukar says. “Both Howard and I have had a lot of experience working with this kind of behavior and dealing with these problems. We try to tell it like it is, deal with the reality at hand, and then offer some concrete, specific strategies for dealing with it.”
Pocatello educators often find the gang activity data surprising, but according to Raukar, the Pocatello Police Department and Bannock County Sheriff’s Department have identified well over 100 kids who are actively involved in gangs in the Pocatello area. “It’s really reached a point of crisis,” says Raukar. “It’s coming from outside Pocatello, but it’s really starting to show up here and to infiltrate our public schools.”
To address the issue, the entire Pocatello School District attended a mandatory training on the first day back this year. “It was really good,” says Stoker. “They focused primarily on gang awareness—the specific numbers, how to identify a gang member, and the various signs that students might be involved.”
Moving Ahead
The irony, of course, is that all of these school-based supports and educational programs did nothing to prevent the Cassie Jo Stoddart murder. Adamcik and Draper showed no signs of at-risk behavior. Neither, apparently, used drugs regularly or was involved in gang activity. Neither had failing grades, nor seems to have been the victim of regular bullying or harassment. Neither divulged anything troubling to a natural helper. Until making the videotape in the days leading up to the murder, neither had shown an obvious obsession with violence or weapons, at least not at school. A Web site developed by Draper did gain some attention after the murder, especially for its mention of Columbine victims, atheism, anarchy, and an interest in horror movies, but it would be a stretch to say it foreshadowed such an act of violence. Nothing suggested that school staff should look for a Web site or examine either Adamcik’s or Draper’s MySpace pages for troubling statements. At least at school, there were simply no red flags.
A year later, Pocatello High is attempting to move on. A memorial vigil was held at the spirit rock on the anniversary of the murder, and the school has taken several steps as a result of the incident. “It’s been hard,” says Stoker. “We’ve got some extra security in our schools, and certainly there’s a heightened awareness among the adults in the building that we need to be watching for anything, any signs of trouble.”
Rauker and others at both the district and state level have approved funding and offered support. “They wanted to enter into a dialogue with the kids about how this happened, why it happened, and what it meant for their school to be safe,” says Rauker, “and we’ve done everything we could to accommodate that. We’re typically very open to schools conducting programs that fit their individual needs anyway, and this was a very special case.”
One result has been a new grant to start what Stoker calls a “virtues program.” The outcome of much soul searching in the school and community, the virtues program will encourage positive attributes in students through a yearlong, multidimensional approach that is similar to the character education programs being implemented across the country. “We’ve got several staff members and a lot of our kids working on it,” says Stoker. “We’re going to involve the community and try to get a really good, positive thing going so that we can maybe change the mindset around here a little bit.”
For staff and students at Pocatallo High, and many others in the community, Cassie Jo Stoddart’s murder has been a turning point unlike any other in recent memory—the kind of tragedy that has the power to change how a school and an entire town views itself. With time and effort, Pocatello High will heal. The town will continue to grow—at whatever pace—as the secret of its many positives gets out. Students will graduate and move toward the future with high hopes, big dreams, and some trepidation. And no one will forget Cassie Jo. 