School leaders can do more to prevent violence

Trouble began at Campbell County Comprehensive High School in Jacksboro, Tenn., after students reported seeing a 14-year-old classmate with a gun on campus. Called to the school office, the student allegedly opened fire when questioned, killing Assistant Principal Ken Bruce and seriously wounding Principal Gary Seale and Assistant Principal Jim Pierce before the .22-caliber pistol was wrestled away.

Campbell County Schools Director Judy Blevins was not available to talk to School Board News, but the Associated Press quoted her as praising the administrators’ heroism and claiming the school’s “safety plan was followed very well.”

But not all security experts agree with that assessment. Kenneth S. Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, questions the decision to call the student to the office, a move he contends increased the likelihood he would flee, hide the weapon, or make use of it. A better response would have been to go to the student -- and give him no opportunity to react to events, he says.

“If the kid is in the classroom, the school resource officers, police, or security personnel should go to the classroom . . . and immediately take control of the student and his belongings,” he says. “They should secure that kid and the weapon as quickly as possible.”

Dale Yeager, CEO of a Pennsylvania-based security consulting and training firm, also points out a possible flaw in the school safety plan. A good plan, he says, would have had school personnel intervene long before the student brought the weapon to school.

He notes that early media reports of the shooting suggest the alleged shooter, Ken Bartley Jr., was troubled. At the age of 12, the student reportedly had been treated for drug and alcohol abuse. One neighbor told reporters that Bartley had stabbed one of the wounded administrators with a pencil in middle school.

With so much research available on the warning signs of potentially violent students, Yeager, author of The State of School Safety in American Schools, says it angers him that so many school security plans still lack procedures for identifying and monitoring troubled students.

“Research on this has been going on for years,” Yeager says. “The ways of managing safe schools exist, but very few people have been listening. We’ve got to teach people to understand the signs [of trouble], interpret those signs, and put a system together to respond. Early intervention -- that’s what’s critical.”

The shooting -- the 12th school-associated violent death since August, according to some sources -- has sparked a round of self-analysis nationwide about the readiness of local schools to deal with violence and whether school officials need to update their crisis plans, boost staff training, and increase practice drills.

Yeager certainly thinks so. Pressure to boost test scores has made school officials reluctant to set aside time for security training, and many school staffs aren’t as knowledgeable as they should be about their school safety plans, he says. Many plans also don’t reflect the latest research on school violence and potentially violent students.

“The fact is that most emergency plans are poorly designed, and people are not tested properly,” he says.

Adding to the debate are statistics showing that, in the past two years, there have been the most school-related deaths since the Columbine shootings in 1999. “We’re definitely seeing an uptick,” Trump says.

Recent incidents underscore the challenges that school officials face in stemming school violence. One day after the Jacksboro shooting, two Germantown, Tenn., high school students were arrested for bringing a .357 Magnum to school. And on Nov. 15, a teenage girl in Broward County, Fla., was shot in the chest on a school bus.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Jacksboro have been struggling to come to terms with their tragedy. Community members and students set up a makeshift memorial, and hundreds attended Bruce’s funeral.