School violence
School violence has been an area of concern for several years, but recent events are once again moving the topic to the front burner. How safe are our schools, and why are some kids so messed up?
In the headlines recently were two stories. The first was about a Canadian student who took three guns and went on a shooting rampage on a Montreal College Campus. The gunmen left one woman dead and 19 others wounded before taking his own life.
A second story told of a Columbine-like plot that was caught before it was too late. Police in Green Bay, WI took two seventeen year old boys into custody. They found stock piles of guns and said that the boys had learned how to make bombs on the internet.
With stories like these in the news, it is a scary time to be a parent, or a school aged child. I think that schools have taken several steps to become safer for our children, and the fact that the plot in WI was stopped is a sign of that. I guess the bigger question is what is causing children to behave this way. There have always been school bullies and outcasts among school populations. That will never change, so why are kids striking out in such violent ways? We need to address these issues before more tragedies occur.
October 2nd, 2006 at 12:54 pm
After a fourth grade student brought a gun into the elementary school in Hendricks MN on 2/27/06, a lid of absolute silence was clamped on the situation so that numerous parents found out only because their children talked about it. The story that resulted in a newspaper omitted details about conditions in that school which motivated one student to defend himself violently against bullies that were out of control. Yet, if you speak to the faculty or administrators, you often hear that there is no bullying problem and that they know nothing about any gun. School employees who did dare to speak up said that they were ordered to keep their mouths shut and feared that they would lose their jobs in they talked. They did allege, however, that serious incidents have been covered up such as a school employee who got some teenage boys drunk so that he could molest them. That, they claimed, was neither reported to the police nor mentioned in the media.