After a fatal shooting at a school in small-town Georgia, districts nationwide were inundated with threats. Superintendents have gotten used to it.
Michael Bennett was standing at Scott M. Ellis Elementary School in Greenville, a rural community a half hour from the New York capital on Sept. 5. The superintendent greeted students with fist bumps and an assuring smile.
He was there, in part, because it was the first day of school. But there was another reason: A tragedy gripping another small town a thousand miles away prompted him to make his presence known.
A day before the start of classes at Bennett’s district, an all-too-familiar occurrence in America happened again – another incident of semiautomatic gunfire on a school campus. Two students and two teachers were fatally shot at a high school in a leafy Georgia suburb. Nine others, mostly students, were injured. Law enforcement officials arrested a 14-year-old who is now facing four counts of murder.
The incident caused Bennett to flash back to a moment that has defined his decades-long career in education. In February 2004, he was getting ready to teach a social studies class at a high school in another small New York town when a student pointed the barrel of a shotgun at his chest. As the student pulled the trigger, the assistant principal knocked the gun downward and Bennett was shot in the lower leg. Thankfully, no one else was hurt. (The student pleaded guilty, served years in prison and has been released.)
Two decades later, the New York superintendent was among many district leaders across the U.S. hustling to contend with the recent ramifications of far-flung gun violence for students, families and staff. Longtime school administrators like Bennett have repeatedly seen shootings disrupt the American education system – even in classrooms thousands of miles and multiple time zones away from the gunfire.
In the days and weeks that followed the Georgia shooting, other schools experienced a rash of threats and incidents, a recognizable pattern that often follows instances of gun violence. The early September tragedy had a significant added factor: It disrupted the back-to-school season at schools nationwide.
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Students in several states were arrested. Administrators increased security protocols. A district a few dozen miles from Bennett’s campus canceled classes and afterschool activities and shuttered buildings after it received threatening phone messages.
These events are not rare. Everytown for Gun Safety, a group that advocates for gun violence prevention, recorded 139 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in the U.S. in 2024.
Far from these shootings, schools feel the ripple effects. Assessing the credibility of threats, especially viral ones that spread online, has become an increasingly common – and challenging – part of the daily lives of school superintendents and principals.
It’s a distraction from the main reason students and teachers are at school in the first place, Bennett said.
“It’s tough to learn when you’re worried about the threats,” he said. “And it’s tough to teach.”
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‘Challenging times’ for school leaders
A week after the shooting in Georgia, another superintendent, Aaron Spence, was juggling a crisis – a deluge of threats directed at the schools he oversees in suburban Virginia.
Law enforcement officials in his town had spent days “tirelessly” running down leads, tracing their origins and speaking to witnesses. Though none of the potential dangers were ultimately deemed credible, Spence knew parents at Loudoun County Public Schools needed two things: First, they had to hear directly from the superintendent. In an email to families, he acknowledged the “senseless violence” happening at other schools in America. They also had to know that any threat, even those made by children and meant as jokes, would be taken seriously and investigated.
Hanging above a box of glasses lens wipes in Spence’s office, a note stuck to a cabinet says: “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” The message was a pandemic-era gift, he said in an interview last week, from a school board member at his previous school district.
“Even when you’re facing certain challenging times, you can learn and grow from it,” he said, recalling how tough it was to keep the coronavirus out of the classroom.
Crisis management is a part of the job description of superintendents. Apart from the copycat threats that inundated Spence’s district this month, the issue of opioid use has also loomed over his tenure. A year ago, nearly a dozen students at one of his schools suffered overdoses over several weeks. The district’s delay in notifying parents about the cases prompted criticism from the state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, who issued an executive order directing Virginia schools to notify parents of a school-connected overdose within 24 hours.
Spence wrote in an August message before school started that the district “remains dedicated to working closely with students, families, staff and the community to address” the epidemic of opioid use. A student suffered another non-fatal overdose outside of school before the start of the year.
Yet as threats circulated in the wake of the Georgia shooting, Spence had to turn his attention to informing students and families about violence prevention.
“Just like when we were kids and we learned that you can’t yell ‘fire’ or ‘bomb’ in a movie theater, in today’s world, they simply cannot post or say things that even suggest an act of violence as the consequences could be severe,” Spence, along with local police chiefs and the sheriff, wrote in a message to parents on Sept. 12.
Experts estimate that school districts field tens of thousands of threats each year. The proliferation of social media has only exacerbated that problem: Posts on TikTok and Instagram landed several students across the U.S. in custody in recent weeks.
Michele Gay is outspoken about the importance of schools taking an active role in threat mitigation. Her daughter was among the 26 people killed in 2012 by a shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. She said the most important thing school leaders can do in the wake of gun violence – no matter how far away it occurs – is communicate. Parents need to know there’s a plan in place, she said.
“Avoiding the conversation just increases anxiety,” she said. “After something like this happens, we need to hear from our leaders.”
Aspiring principals undeterred
Kevin Lein was in the middle of teaching when his phone lit up with news about the Georgia shooting.
Many of the messages were coming from the Principal Recovery Network, which was started in 2019 for principals who’ve experienced gun violence firsthand. Lein was a principal in Harrisburg, South Dakota, in 2015 when he was shot in the arm by a 16-year-old student who’d brought a gun on campus.
Lein never lost his vigor for educating, though, and now works as a professor at a college in Nebraska, where he mentors aspiring principals. As information trickled in about the Georgia shooting in early September, Lein brought it up with his students. Though some were anxious about the prospect of eventually encountering gun violence on campus, fear wouldn’t deter any of them from wanting to become principals. It gave him hope.
“They don’t have a fear for their lives,” he said. “They have a fear of not going forward and doing something about this.”
Zachary Schermele covers education and breaking news for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele.
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Publish date : 2024-09-22 22:09:00
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