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Heeding the Signs Part 7 SEARCHING FOR a classmate on the playground in a dispute over a ball. When asked why he did it, the little boy answered, "Nobody loves me, anyway." School personnel learned only after the shooting that his divorced parents both had AIDS, and his mother had recently been charged with killing a former husband in Colorado. Butte Public Schools swung into action soon after the tragedy to design a safety-net system to cover every school child. "In Butte we have created an interagency, site-based safety team at each school, made up of parents, human services workers, law enforcement officers, and others from community organizations and religious groups," says Kate Stetzner, Butte's Superintendent. The district has initiated a parent-directed peer mediation program and conflict-resolution trainings. It has adopted a "bullyproofing" curriculum developed in Colorado. And it has created a crisis-response plan that covers everything from guns to earthquakes, specifying such details as who should call 911 and who will handle communication with parents. "Collaboration within the school community is the key," says Stetzner, who was principal at the school where the shooting occurred. Bill Ferguson, the new Superintendent of the Lower Kuskokwim School District in Bethel, says his staff has initiated a variety of strategies in the wake of the shooting there. The cornerstone is a districtwide antiviolence curriculum (see Page 20 for details) that starts with preschoolers and works with them through middle school to help them control impulses, manage anger, and feel empathy for others. Besides developing safety plans for the 26 schools in the isolated, 10,000-square-mile district, more itinerant social workers now travel to village schools to meet the needs of at-risk students (an expensive operation on this roadless river delta, where travelers are dependent on airplanes, skiffs, and snow machines). And the district is seeking closer connections with human service agencies. "We're trying to develop programs to pull parents and the community into the schools," Ferguson says, "to make them aware of the issues young people are facing in the world." Ferguson maintains, however, that it will always be difficult for school personnel, given the present level of resources, to identify students like Evan who may do something violent. "One of our big problems is that we're being held accountable for quality education at the same time that we're expected to meet the social and emotional needs of our students," he says. "We're not picking up any extra federal or state dollars to do this. … I think it's something the society as a whole will have to address." Ron Bloodworth, who coordinates youth suicide prevention efforts for Oregon, agrees that schools cannot do it alone. "These are community issues, and although the school has an important part to play, other players in the community have to step up to the plate," he said in a recent interview. Bloodworth is working with a task force of professionals, lay people, and social services agencies to come up with a statewide suicide prevention plan to be implemented in 1999. Linkages among schools, social services, and community organizations are critical to successfully implementing antiviolence programs such as depression screening and suicide prevention, Bloodworth says. According to Stetzner, a member of a presidential task force on school safety, help may be on the way. She attended the first White House summit on school safety in October, when President Clinton pledged $600 million dollars to revamp the Department of Education's Safe and Drug-Free Schools Act. "This means that all the things we know make a difference in developing comprehensive safe-school plans are going to be possible because we are going to give schools the money they need to do these things," Stetzner says. One of the most hopeful signs, she says, is a changing attitude within the legal system. Stetzner paraphrases a remark by Attorney General Janet Reno, who said the need for early intervention is finally being recognized in the law-enforcement community. The answer, Reno said, is prevention, not prisons.
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