or more drug-free. . . . Both the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office have tried to kill this program. Yet both Republican and Democratic presidents have joined with opposition parties in Congress to keep the program alive.”35 The public’s willingness to swallow symbolic pork instead of clamoring for meatier programs is evident in a lengthy investigative article published by the Los Angeles Times on the Safe and Drug Free Schools program, perhaps the only such journalistic examination by a national newspaper. Published after a year of high-profile school shootings in Oregon and Kentucky, the article found “gaping holes in government attempts to ensure safe schools,” formed by often bizarre expenditures of safe-schools funds. “In Richmond, Virginia, where a ninth grader shot and wounded a basketball coach and a teacher’s aide two days before school let out in June, state education officials spent $16,000 to publish a drug-free party guide that recommends staging activities such as Jell-O wrestling and pageants “where guys dress up in women’s wear,” wrote the reporter, Ralph Frammolino. He also found that “taxpayer dollars paid for motivational speakers, puppet shows, tickets to Disneyland, resort weekends and a $6,500 toy police car. Federal funds also are routinely spent on dunking booths, lifeguards and entertainers, including magicians, clowns and a Southern beauty queen, who serenades students with pop hits.” In one of his most disturbing discoveries, he wrote that months before the middle school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas, by two adolescent boys, local officials used some of the safe-schools funding to hire a magician to perform in the school.36
School violence as now understood and experienced is not a new phenomenon, but part of a continuum that stretches back in time. The particular safety and discipline challenges schools and students face have shifted as conditions outside the schoolhouse have changed. Guns are the most threatening part of the equation, and as long as children and teens have ready access to them, lethal violence will always be with us, in schools and out. While the vast majority of public schools continue to be safe—safer than students’ own homes or neighborhoods in many cases—addressing disruptive behavior and safety issues will always be part of the educational process. The question is how those issues are approached, and at the end of the twentieth century, the answer was the criminal justice model that has so dramatically shaped society. It’s small wonder. When prisons are built faster than new schools as a solution to social and economic problems, a penal approach to school violence of any magnitude appears as the logical fix even if there is little evidence that it works to make schools and students safer. Parents, educators, and communities that should have known better were willing to follow in lockstep as politicians and so-called experts began the crackdown on students. Every choice to adopt another punitive measure—policing, surveillance, metal detectors, zero tolerance rules—has turned students into suspects, and moved the schoolhouse further down the slippery slope to the jailhouse.
Guns are not to blame, and the ready availability of them is not to blame . . . It’s in the minds of the children . . . I’m not a psychologist.
—J. D. Tanner, owner of the Denver gun show where Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris obtained their guns, two weeks after the Columbine incident
When someone says, “Well, if this law had been in effect, would it have prevented what happened? We will never know. I believe there is a chance if that law was in effect and Robyn Anderson [who bought guns for Harris and Klebold] couldn’t get the guns so easily, that she would have said, “No, I can’t do this.” They [Harris and Klebold] would have gone to somebody else. Sure. But maybe that next person would have said, “Whoa, what’s going on here. I better talk to somebody about this.”
—Tom Mauser, a gun control activist whose son, Daniel, was killed in Columbine High School, on a state law to require background checks for sales at gun shows.
The Columbine Memorial is carved into a knoll in Clement Park, a vast tract of emerald lawns, sports fields, and playgrounds on Pierce Street, abutting Columbine High School. Past the baseball field and picnic areas, the memorial is hidden from view until you are right at its entrance. A few discreet signs around the park direct visitors to the red rock and granite environmental design, with its inner “ring of remembrance” and outer “ring of healing.” The inner ring offers individual biographies of the twelve students and one teacher killed that day, spelled out on the top surface of a granite wall. On the ground, a looped ribbon and the words “Never Forgotten,” the motto of those touched by the tragedy, are worked into a stone paving design. Etched onto dark tablets on the red wall of the outer ring are quotes from unnamed students, teachers, and community members, as well as one from Bill Clinton, who was president when the assault occurred. One unattributed quote asks rhetorically, yet provocatively, “It brought the nation to its knees but now that we’ve gotten back up how have things changed; what have we learned?” I visited Columbine High School and the surrounding community in May 2008, nine years after the iconic incident of school violence. Had anything changed, and were lessons learned by students, teachers, parents, and administrators? Despite the motto’s sentiments, many would prefer to forget the events of April 20, 1999, and the dubious notoriety it conferred on their hometown. “There’s an element in the community that is ashamed of what happened,” says Tom Mauser, whose son, Daniel, was fifteen when he was killed. “They want Columbine to be this place of healing, but it’s this place that had this terrible tragedy.”
Although Columbine High’s postal address is Littleton, the area is actually an unincorporated part of Jefferson County and the suburban sprawl that radiates out from Denver twelve miles to the north. It is an area of upper-middle-class affluence and homogeneity, with a population that is about 90 percent white. Christian evangelical churches are abundant and the politics are decidedly Republican. Former farmlands have been gobbled up by cookie-cutter strip malls and McMansion developments with names like the Hamlet at Columbine and Columbine Knolls. Many declare at their entrances, “A covenant protected community,” referring to the standards for residents’ property maintenance—even what colors houses may be painted—in the name of maintaining homogeneity and property values for all. The snow-frosted Rocky Mountains rise up rugged and wild in the near distance, an incongruous backdrop to the manicured landscapes below them. Conformity, not notoriety, is what people who live in the Columbine Valley expect. When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold committed their terrible assault, they not only destroyed lives, they put their community on the map, held it up for public dissection and disapproval, and breached a tacit covenant on conventionality that residents take as an article of faith.
It would be difficult to overstate the impact the Columbine attack has had on popular attitudes about youth violence and school safety, and on policing and security policies in public schools. It wasn’t the first public school shooting with multiple victims. There was a string of them from 1997 to 1998, including the incidents in Springfield, Oregon, and Jonesboro, Arkansas. But the toll at Columbine High—fifteen dead, including the two attackers, and twenty-four wounded—was the highest, and the teens’ weaponry was unprecedented. Columbine, as the incident is now known, is the yardstick by which all school shootings will be measured. Ironically, the tragedy occurred as rates of school violence in general and shootings in particular were declining. However, statistical realities were easily swamped by widespread public fears of school and youth violence. Polls taken after the well-publicized 1998 elementary school shooting in Jonesboro, for example, found that 71 percent of respondents expected a school shooting in their community; a poll conducted two days after Columbine found 80 percent expected more school shootings. Reporting on school shootings and Columbine in particular played no small role in bringing school violence into communities and homes around the country with coverage that created an echo chamber for simmering public panic about schools. For the news media, Columbine was a terrible tragedy but a great story. It garnered the most public interest of any story that year, with one survey finding that 68 percent of Americans followed it closely.1 Top newspaper and broadcast executives named Columbine the year’s second most important story, right after President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.2
Healing
