The Shots in Santee Echo in O.C.

On March 5, Santee experienced an earthquake. It was not of the seismic variety, but it was as devastating as if it had reached a magnitude of 8. In yet the latest in a series of school shootings, our nation again has been asking how a high school student could have been so emotionally distraught as to carry a gun to school and fire at classmates as if they were targets in a shooting gallery.

The week following this incident was memorable and challenging for school administrators. Notably, the students of Capistrano Unified School District never faced a real threat similar to what happened at Santana High School. Our problem was not so much one of maintaining school safety as calming students, controlling hysteria, tracking down rumors and dealing with opportunistic pranksters.

In view of what had happened in Santee, we took seriously every threat, rumor and questionable statement uttered by a student, and with the aid of police agencies, we checked them out one by one. Among the more unusual situations:

* A 10-year-old in one of our elementary schools told his friends that his father owned a gun like the one used at Santana High School and that he would bring it to school the next day as part of a show-and-tell activity. Imagine the excitement that created.

* At one of our middle schools, a student walked around campus telling friends he intended to shoot particular students. When the principal summoned him to the office for an explanation, the boy smiled and pulled a camera out of his backpack, saying he was simply planning to take photographs. The boy’s sense of humor was lost on the principal and many of his fellow students.

* At an elementary school, lunchroom workers ran out of hamburgers before all the students were served. Remaining students were given pizza. One 9-year-old proclaimed loudly that if he couldn’t get his hamburger, he was going to shoot someone. In another time, such a comment would have been viewed in a less serious context. Not during these times, however, as the young man learned.

* At one of our elementary schools a hysterical mother was detained by police because she was blocking traffic in front of the school, advising parents that they should not drop their children off and claiming school officials were not taking threats of gun violence seriously enough. There was never any threat of harm to students, but parents didn’t know that in view of the woman’s hysteria.

* In what had to be this year’s worst case of poor judgment and poor timing in our district, a high school girl on a Friday afternoon told students how “neat” she thought it would be if someone came and shot up their school the way Santana High was. The girl was immediately taken to the office, her parents were contacted, and she was dealt with appropriately. But the damage had been done. The rumor mill worked overtime during the weekend, including the widespread use of e-mail. Monday morning the high school experienced an absentee rate of more than 75%.

* In one of the most poignant situations we encountered, a middle-school girl, who is a very well-behaved child and good academic student, told a school counselor that since the Santana High shootings she had been experiencing a recurring dream that she was standing in the midst of a group of students with an automatic weapon in her hands and was shooting them one by one. With the help of her family and the school counselor, she is receiving therapy.

We all work together to address long-term solutions to youth alienation, and we work with students to create cultural paradigms that reject bullying and violence. As tragic as a Santana High School incident is for those directly affected, something like this has a profound psychological effect on children everywhere, and it serves as a major distraction to learning.

I hope that every adult in our community, both in and out of our schools, will meet the challenge of nurturing, valuing and protecting our children during these sensitive times. That’s one way of working to make sure we don’t experience a similar tragedy in Orange County.