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Sandy Hook Memorial by Liam Enea from Flickr.
On the heels of a school shooting at Covenant school, a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, Westwood Public Schools (WPS) Superintendent Emily Parks emailed a letter to students' families on Monday, March 27th, noting that student safety is the district's "top priority" and that helping students feel positively connected to the community is a focus, everyday.
On Monday at the independent school Covenant School in Nashville, a shooter killed six people. The victims were three children, all 9 years of age, the head of the school, and two staff members.
In her most recent letter, as in the past, Ms. Parks has emphasized the priority of helping WPS students to feel connected to their school community. Following the tragedy of the Uvalde school shooting incident, Ms. Parks noted that, along with technical safety measures, WPS is committed to "engendering a climate in which respect, inclusion and care are the norm; in which every student feels a genuine sense of connection to at least one adult in the building; in which students are known as individuals, not one of the crowd; and where students and adults feel a shared sense of responsibility for the welfare of others."
Both personal testimony and academic research offer some support to the focus of WPS on students and community connectedness. Feelings of marginalization, isolation, bullying and rejection all have been associated with school shooters.
Researchers sometimes add the caveat that plenty of people who share these and other characteristics with school shooters never become violent. For example, researchers caution that not all mass shooters should be classified as mentally ill and many people with mental illness do not engage in violence against others.
Research on the issue of gun violence prevention continues, as the need for it continues. The American Academy of Pediatrics reported in November 2022, "Firearms are the leading cause of death in children and youth from 0 to 24 years of age in the United States."
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You may also be interested in:
- Safety Measures at Westwood Public Schools and a Perspective on Tragedies like Uvalde, Texas
- Former Police Chief Joins Team at Westwood Public Schools
- 3 Ways to Prevent School Shootings, Based on Research
- American Gun Culture: Frontier Mythology Ignores How Common Gun Restrictions Were in Old West
Replies
Christina Martin
Neighbor
3-29-2023 8:55am
Just to clarify further, people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. See this link from the NIH: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537064/
The statement in the article is not as emphatic as it probably should be.
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Darlene Cancell
Editor
3-30-2023 12:46pm
Thanks for including that link to recent research that underscores the importance, touched on in the article, of not conflating mental illness with criminality. And good point to bring up that people experiencing mental illness are often the victims. Thanks for sharing.
