COPAA, the Council of Parents, Attorneys and Advocates, released a statement after the Parkland shootings urging us not to use yet another school shooting tragedy as an impetus to marginalize students with emotional issues and mental illness but to remind us that school districts need to address these students’ issues. School districts are mandated under the IDEA to both identify and provide services to students with mental health issues under the classification of Emotional Disturbance. These students need help; they don’t need to be pushed out or excluded from school due to their occasionally very problematic behavioral issues.
The elephant in the room, of course, is the troubled history of the Parkland shooter. At the time the COPAA statement was drafted, we knew very little about Nikolas Cruz. We now know, however, that the alleged shooter was a special education student with significant mental health issues who had ultimately been placed in an alternative placement and unsuccessfully re-integrated back into his home school. At age 18, Cruz exercised his legal right to waive special education services and left school where he received no services.
According to a blog by Christina Samuels In Education Week, the troubled academic history of Cruz illustrates the tension between a school’s need to provide services to a potentially dangerous student yet protect other students from harm. Cruz represents one of 335,000 students in the country in 2016-2017 who received special education services under the classification of Emotional Disability. Although, these students represented only 6% of the overall special educational population, 13% of them were placed in special schools (compared to 3% of the overall special education population).
Yet despite the fears engendered by this population of students, an “exhaustive” examination of “targeted school shootings” conducted by the US Secret Service and the Department of Education found that “while perpetrators commonly described being bullied or persecuted and had thoughts of suicide, they generally did not have a history of mental health evaluations or diagnosis with a mental disorder.” We have already written a recent blogs about the fallacy of linking mental illness to school violence. The nexus is small. Yet the demonization of mental illness is escalating in our charged political climate, which is informing ill-thought out and inappropriate policy. The focus in public policy to quasi-militarize our schools and arm our teachers doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The students who pose the greatest threat are generally not special education students.
Jennifer Young, an assistant professor of English Composition in Wisconsin, states in a different Education Week blog that locked doors and a police presence coupled with a shooter who is willing to die will never deter a school shooting. As Ms. Young points out, Sandy Hook Elementary School was properly locked on the day 26 people were murdered. The shooter simply blasted through the doors. Conversely, a different potential school shooter in Georgia was deterred not by guns, but by a supportive conversation with the school bookkeeper who talked him out of the planned shooting. In this latter situation, according to Ms. Young, human empathy triumphed over failed security systems. Ms. Young goes on to make a rather startling recommendation: perhaps we should consider lessening school security rather than increasing it while promoting stronger cultures of empathy and caring.
This suggestion will obviously never fly in today’s political climate, and Ms. Young herself concedes it is simplistic. Yet, we must acknowledge her fundamental argument: rather than responding to yet another school shooting crisis with more guards, dogs, or metal detectors, we should be directing far more of our efforts into developing stronger cultures of understanding and compassion in our schools to prevent future school shootings. We need to reach these troubled and alienated students before they reach for guns.
I have sat at far too many IEP meetings with parents who were begging for services for their children who had extreme levels of anxiety or depression or who were struggling to cope with debilitating social isolation. Many of these students were experiencing horrific bullying. Yet, time and time again, school staff “didn’t see” what the parents described. Conversely, other students are wrongly viewed as potential dangers (think ASD) where every statement and movement are scrutinized to the point of escalating the student’s already fragile emotional state.
What districts “see,” and possibly over respond to, are the externalizing behaviors that disrupt school environments. Staff then resort to behavioral plans that too often provide negative consequences, which serve not only to escalate the behaviors, and possibly result in pushing the student out of school and away from desperately needed therapeutic support. These students fail to receive training in the adaptive skills needed to be both successful in their school environments and in their communities.
School safety is of course paramount. Students shouldn’t be afraid to go to school. Teachers must be allowed to teach and not worry about how to protect their students in the event the unthinkable happens. Threat assessments, which I will discuss at a later date, must be conducted. But let’s be sure not to marginalize those students of ours—those with mental illness or other emotional disorders—who are statistically far more likely to be victims than perpetrators and fail to provide them needed services.
