What’s nearly as disturbing as the notion of a deranged shooter opening fire on kids is how familiar such news has become.
And what’s almost as troubling as this week’s attack on Deer Creek Middle School is how accustomed we are to watching students running for cover and their panicked moms and dads scrambling to learn which children were shot.
I’m as neurotic as any parent. Yet I sent my kids to school like any other day Wednesday, without a thought about Deer Creek.
“It’s hard to know how different it would be for us as onlookers if the outcome had been different (Tuesday),” said Linda Kanan, director of the Colorado School Safety Resource Center. “I hope it doesn’t mean that we’re used to these things or that, for some reason, we’ve become numb.”
A former teacher and school psychologist, Kanan is in the business of thinking about the unthinkable. Tuesday’s attack in Jefferson County marked the state’s first school shooting since the legislature created her program in 2008 to help prevent school violence.
We all struggle to find meaning in yet another rampage at yet another school so close to home. For Kanan, meaning comes in public policy.
“Parents should know that we’re doing just about everything we can do in terms of safety plans,” she says.
State laws passed since the 1999 massacre at Columbine High require schools not only to have emergency plans but also to coordinate those plans with law enforcers. Many buildings have been remodeled or their security systems reconfigured with the threat of school violence in mind. Students are well-practiced in lockdowns and evaluation drills. And educators and first-responders meet for training in the latest approaches on crisis response. A statewide school safety conference is scheduled today in Thornton.
Like most state programs, Kanan’s office is working under severe budget cuts. Still, she urges Coloradans to find comfort in reforms.
“Hopefully, every time something like this happens, parents are seeing evidence of schools being better prepared. I hope they know we’re learning to take better care of their children,” she says.
Denverite Robin Finegan specializes in working with disaster victims and lauds the reforms that have been passed since Columbine. But she’s also a realist. Though laws, training, best-practices and commitments of time and energy are critical systemically, she says, they’re also ways of trying to convince ourselves that we have some control over the uncontrollable.
Events like Tuesday’s can rattle the confidence of even those of us who experience them indirectly as news stories. They rattle our theories about the world.
“They can shake our basic beliefs that if we’re good people who make good decisions, bad things won’t happen to us,” she says.
And so we pass policies, open state offices and do what else we can to separate ourselves from uncomfortable possibilities.
“We need to live in ways where we’re not existing in a paranoid state,” Finegan says. “We create things in order to go on. We try to make sense of things and try to build a sense of control so we can wake up in the mornings and still send our children to school.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
