This post was originally posted kappanonline.org’s The Grade.
At this point, we all know the broad outline of what happened.
On Monday, Oxford High School (OHS) sophomore Ethan Crumbley met with a guidance counselor after a teacher found him searching for bullets on his phone.
On Tuesday, he met with guidance counselors, the dean of students, and his parents after a teacher saw deranged illustrations and chilling words in his notebook.
The school didn’t think he was a threat to himself or anyone else. His parents didn’t want to take him home.
He went back to class. Shortly thereafter, he walked out of a bathroom and killed four students with a semi-automatic pistol.
These facts elicit despair.
The details elicit rage:
The juvenile text his own mother sent him later on Monday after she learned about the first meeting: “LOL I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.”
The early Christmas present Ethan’s father bought him on Black Friday.
The photo of that present Ethan posted to Instagram. “Just got my new beauty today,” he captioned, with a heart-eyes emoji.
The words discovered in his notebook, resistant to any but the most obvious interpretations, at least to anyone who’s been paying minimal attention since 1999: The thoughts won’t stop. Help me. Blood everywhere. My life is useless. The world is dead.
Ethan’s explanation for the drawings and words? “I’m designing a video game.” LOL indeed.
The near certainty that the gun was in the backpack at Ethan’s feet as he was speaking with school officials and his parents Tuesday and that no one thought to search that backpack for a gun.
The fact that he went back to class.
The fact that — the unfathomable fact — that at no point were any of the three school administrators contacted about any of this.
Not the principal. Not the two assistant principals.
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These last two facts, arousing such rage and confusion as they do, have prompted a bit of finger-pointing, suggestions of criminal charges against OHS school officials, and appear to be the main reason — aside from, you know, the shooting itself — of the three-page letter the superintendent (who was retiring in a month) wrote defending “the events leading up to the shooting.”
But before we call for their heads, is it craven to remind outsiders what a tangle of complications school administrators’ year has been?
The district’s unresolved mask mandate and their decision to close the high school for two days recently on account of staff shortages and COVID infections only begins to hint at the exhausting logistical obstacles those administrators have had to work around.
Behind the scenes, there have likely been any number of post-pandemic problems: student misbehavior, absenteeism, learning loss, instructional slack, generalized malaise, havoc wreaked by social media.
Since the first minute of the first hour of the first day of school, these challenges have exhausted resources, devoured time and necessitated stop-gaps to such an extent that on some days it probably feels like a miracle that the bells even ring.
Maybe, perhaps, the breakdown in communication between guidance counselors, the (new) dean of students, and school administration doesn’t reveal rank incompetence as much as it reveals a system already stretched too thin.
Who knows what else was happening at OHS that day?
Even in the middle of all the anger and confusion, let us remember the lesson we forget again and again and again, and that most educators know in their gut, but that few of us are able to say out loud: our schools won’t save society from itself.
There’s no reading program that will close the achievement gap. No civics curriculum that will get out the vote. No evaluation system that will improve all teachers. No rejiggering of school funding or busing program that will level the playing field.
Schools shape society with the tools society gives to schools. And there is no school safety protocol, or battalion of school resource officers, or number of active shooter drills that can save a school from two parents who on Black Friday, instead of buying their 15-year-old son a Nintendo Switch, bought him a semi-automatic handgun.
Above image: Vija Celmins, Gun with Hand #1, 1964