Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009

Issac Bailey | Place blame later, reassess now

I got the feeling at Monday night's Horry County school board meeting that the shooting death of a 16-year-old Carolina Forest High School student by a school resource officer wasn't a clarion wakeup call.

The meeting felt like a big exhale, the tone "Thank God it wasn't worse."

Don't get me wrong. I understand that school officials have a tightrope to walk.

They have to reassure a wary public while not being able to talk much about an incident under investigation by the state's top law enforcement agency.

There are potential legal landmines any time a student dies on campus, particularly at the hands of someone hired to keep the school safe.

And there are two families in mourning and a host of students, faculty and staff still shaken.

That's why the board was wise to issue a bland official statement which offered condolences to the families of the student and officer but no details about the case. It's one of the rare times I was in agreement with the board while it withholds information from the public. I think that public, too much of which has been playing a game of Place the Blame since Friday, needs to follow the board's lead and wait for the details to emerge before passing final judgment.

The statement Monday night also was important because in the aftermath of Friday's shooting it seemed as though the district was suggesting a conclusion had been reached, at least about who wasn't to blame. The solicitor's office over the weekend followed up with a similar sentiment. But if we've determined what happened and why, what's the point of SLED's ongoing investigating?

The board announced it will reassess its safety strategy and praised Carolina Forest officials for their deft handling of the unprecedented event.

All of that seemed necessary, right even, but not enough. It seemed akin to obsessing over the tightness of the straps of the gurney of a patient who just suffered a massive heart attack while ignoring his chest.

It didn't feel like the shooting had become a wake-up call because the officials I spoke with couldn't answer questions that should have become a priority since March when an 8-year-old at Myrtle Beach Elementary School was handcuffed for an out-of-control tantrum. They couldn't tell me if the district supplements the officers' training with something more specific - from their end, not the police academy - for the handling of children in our schools.

They couldn't tell me the number of clashes between students, of any age, and resource officers. Are they increasing? Decreasing? What's causing them? What are teachers seeing and experiencing? Has there been a rise in threats they face from students? Have they seen a spike in serious bullying, the kind that prompted a Myrtle Beach High School student a couple years ago to take a gun to school and accidentally shoot himself?

Tracking and studying the number and details of such incidents could help us determine if Friday's shooting and March's handcuffing were anomalies; suggest a disturbing shift in our children's attitudes; or the need to reassess our beliefs about what is effective intervention and appropriate interaction in the lives of our most-unpredictable and hardest-to-reach students.

I'm not naive about the dangers lurking in schools. I know there were 53 gun or weapon-related expulsions and suspensions last year in Horry County out of more than 36,000 students. I'm scheduled to intervene soon in the lives of a group of students who have already found their way to the wrong side of the law. And I learned recently a former Socastee High student I mentored was shot to death in Kansas City, the place he once left fleeing crime.

I know that the consequences of the less-than-ideal home lives and environments of which some students are saddled make their way into the schools the same way they make it into area Wal-Marts.

But the questions I had in March after the handcuffing of that 8-year-old are the same ones I have now:

Are we missing something? Are the school policies and procedures in place the correct ones for recognizing the difference between unruly, potentially dangerous and somewhat-disturbed but harmless students? Can we do better?

The worst time to have such questions answered is in a closed-door room with a 16-year-old autistic boy allegedly armed with two knifes and a decorated 18-year police veteran armed with a gun.