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Emotional Lessons Part 2
A SHATTERED PEACE Residents refer to the incident simply as The Shooting. Two years later, talking about it still comes hard for many. Throats tighten up. Words fail. Eyes trail off into some unfocused distance. Late at night, as sled dogs yip and whine under an arctic moon, some who were at the scene that day lie awake, remembering the hot smell of gunpowder, the plink-plink-plink of shotgun pellets, the gallop of panicked students, the troopers storming the building, the boy being slammed to the floor on his face, the handcuffs, the blood. Others remember no details, only a blur of fear and confusion that left them numb. It was a cold February morning. Students were just getting to school, shedding coats, gloves, and snow boots-necessities on the frozen tundra. The plinking of the shotgun seemed unreal, impossible, like a segment ripped from a movie script or a story torn from somebody else's front page. It was the kind of thing that was connected to other places: big cities, impersonal places, places you watch on the six o'clock news. It was never supposed to happen here, in this small town where everybody knew everybody else-or thought they did. Two people died that day: Ron Edwards, Principal of Bethel Regional High School, and sophomore Josh Palacios, a popular basketball player. Two other students were wounded. The event was made more terrible by a tragic irony: The shooter was the longtime foster son of the district superintendent. Afterward, at packed community meetings, the outraged question, How could this happen? soon evolved into a problem-solving question, How can we stop this from happening again? The first ideas that surfaced were physical measures -metal detectors, campus cops, locked-down buildings. But, as district Safety Coordinator Kent Harding points out, "You can impose security systems to where it becomes more of a penal institution than a public school." Besides, such solutions, had they been in place, wouldn't have altered the seeds of the deed-the troubled life of 16-year-old Evan, son of a convicted felon and an alcoholic mother. Described by Boston Globe reporter Steve Fainaru as an obsessive player of violent video games who was "frequently picked on by stronger, more popular boys," and who "struggled to control an explosive temper," Evan (say ee-VAN) was not unlike countless kids whose inner battles go unnoticed in a revved-up, disordered world. In Bethel, as in communities everywhere, troubles rooted off-campus in chaotic homes and fragmented families inevitably invade schoolhouses. "By far the most serious concern of many parents and teachers is that the issues that led to the shootings extend far beyond the walls of Bethel Regional High," Fainaru wrote in a three-part series on the Bethel killings titled "Alaska School Murders: A Window on Teen Rage" (October 18-20, 1998). Jacqueline Volkmann, a social worker at the high school the year of the shooting, told Fainaru: "There's so many kids out there who believe they are nobodies, nothing. Kids that feel alone, rejected, abandoned. So many kids nobody pays attention to." Some of these cast-off kids show outward signs of potential violence. Former teacher Pat Martin recalls that while the mayhem raged in the hallways that day, students huddling behind classroom doors were asking, Who's the shooter? Seven or eight names came up -names of confused youths who seemed angry enough to blast away classmates and staff. But no one saw Evan's explosion coming. "The whole time Evan was ramming through the school shooting his gun off, his name was never mentioned," says Martin, who was a close friend of the slain principal. "The scary part," she adds, "is that most of those seven or eight kids-kids the other students feel have the same capability (for violence as Evan)-are still there." As if to prove Martin's point, while Evan sat in prison awaiting trial the following year, other boys' threats to bring guns to school kept Bethel High students confined to their classrooms on two occasions. And that winter in Quinahagak, one of 22 Eskimo villages served by the Lower Kuskokwim School District, a 13-year-old shot his mother to death in her bed and then tried to kill his father. Rocked once again, the district was all the more stunned because the boy's mother was a longtime school secretary. Troubled kids are not in short supply in Bethel, the hub for dozens of roadless villages scattered across the delta where the Kuskokwim and Yukon rivers empty into the Bering Sea. Villagers, most of Yup'ik Eskimo ancestry, travel by small planes, aluminum skiffs, and snow machines to Bethel for jobs, social services, medical care, business dealings, and (especially when the annual state dividends arrive) for parties. Though alcohol is not for sale in Bethel and is illegal in the villages, it seeps in. The toll on many families is steep. Such troubles show up in classrooms in the form of behavior problems ranging from spitwads to suicide. The shooting is the extreme end of a spectrum of disruption that plays out every day in district schools. Last year at Bethel's Kilbuck Elementary School, the incendiary message "KKK" was carved in big letters on the side of the building, and obscene words were scrawled on bathroom stalls, according to Principal Phyllis Williams. Bullying and harassment-the same kind of razzing and hassling that Evan reportedly suffered at school -are commonplace, she says. Threats and name-calling, what Williams sums up as "the inability to be tolerant and accepting," interfere with learning, and poison relationships among students. These issues were nothing new in Bethel. But it was the high school shooting that focused the community's attention. Townspeople, teachers, and district personnel began to ask, Did Evan lack certain social skills that might have steered him from his murderous course? Can we teach those skills to the children who remain in our care? Is there a curriculum that could help kids-all kids-better vent their frustrations, understand their feelings, and get along with others? Can we use the shooting as a catalyst for change in our community?
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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