Last month, two students were killed and five students were injured during a Nov. 14 shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, CA. The shooting has once again raised questions of how both schools and government are handling shootings, and how students can cope in such an unstable environment.
Since Nov. 17, there have been 369 mass shootings; this is more shootings than total days in the year. The most recent shooting took place at Saugus High School.
During the tragedy, the shooter killed 15 year old Gracie Muehlberger and 14 year old Dominic Blackwell, along with injuring five others, before shooting himself.
Mass shootings such as Columbine in 1999, Sandy Hook in 2012, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 2018 have shocked the nation to its very core.
“When Columbine happened, I wasn’t principal at the time, and then you had Sandy Hook Elementary — I don’t think anybody realized that somebody would be that horrific a person,” said Sedro-Woolley High School Principal Kerri Carlton. “It really was then the idea that somebody could come in and do those horrific acts to children who truly can’t defend themselves.”
Not only have these terrible events appalled the public, but they have also surfaced concerns for school safety, leading school administrators to enact multiple safety precautions.
“There’s always concerns about the safety of the kids and school shootings, so we just go through proper training, we do drills. Of course we lock the building up and we have a camera system to check and make sure everything is safe. We haven’t done much of anything different other than that,” said Sedro-Woolley High School’s head of campus security, Danny Crosby.
Additionally, a 2014 safety levy gave Sedro-Woolley School District access to further preventative measures.
“They passed a safety and technology levy that allowed us to put in a full security camera system and allowed us to have a locking door mechanism — literally, as soon as that button is pressed, there is a lockout, meaning that if we’ve got a safety hazard outside, all doors immediately lock — and then we just practice what it should look like,” said Carlton. “Our biggest concern really just making sure we can get people in a secure place as quickly as possible so we can save lives.”
Not only is it imperative that precautions are taken in the event of a school shooting, but it is also imperative that students are supported throughout such a harrowing time in the nation’s social environment.
“How do you set up a school that allows for students to feel that they’ve got adults they can turn to in their struggling so they don’t turn to an alternative that, for the rest of their life, could destroy other lives, including theirs?” asked Carlton.
According to Crosby, the answer is: “Reaching out and doing what you can to make your school safe, and passing that on to others.”