As a new school year begins, the state’s largest teachers' unions and other education experts are calling for better responses to threats of violence. Educators are still reeling from the mass school shooting in Texas last spring, as well as the Buffalo incident that killed 10 people.
The union leaders say schools need to be better prepared for the grim reality that classrooms are increasingly a target for mass shootings and a setting for other forms of violence.
The gunman in Uvalde, Texas, is accused of killing 21 people – 19 elementary schoolchildren and two teachers – before police officers were able to kill him.
The man accused in the mass shooting at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo in May allegedly threatened to commit a murder-suicide at his high school near Binghamton one year earlier.
New York State United Teachers President Andy Pallotta said students and teachers also face an increasing number of more minor – but violent – incidents. He named a few that occurred during the past school year, including when several schools in the Hudson Valley received bomb threats and other threats of violence on May 5, and when a Syracuse student brought a gun to school, saying he needed it for protection, later that month.
“The headlines from this past school year tell a story that is full of problems and disruption,” Pallotta said.
New York City’s United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said hardening school security has not been the answer.
"Instead of talking about arming teachers and locking down schools as prisons, we have to start with the issue of giving the school community what it needs to actually start dealing with the issues that our children are facing,” Mulgrew said.
The unions have issued a report that calls for better coordination among school administrators, teachers and even students to react to potential threats and stop them before they happen.
The report recommends standard school safety procedures that use methods proven to be effective in identifying potentially dangerous situations before they escalate.
Jackie Schildkraut, a professor at SUNY Oswego and a national expert on mass shootings, worked on the task force that wrote the report. She also worked with the Syracuse City School District to implement safety programs, beginning shortly after the 2018 Parkland, Florida, shooting that killed 14 students and three staff members.
Schildkraut said every school in the district had a different policy for dealing with a potentially dangerous incident. That created confusion, she said. Now all the schools follow the same procedure, using tactics proven to be successful.
She said another goal is to make lockdown drills less scary for students.
“There are things that we know [how to do] that do not raise the trauma of a drill. The same way that we don’t set schools on fire to practice a fire drill, we don’t have to simulate active shooter … situations to practice a lockdown,” Schildkraut said.
The unions said schools need to hire more staff with expertise in dealing with violence and students with mental health issues, including more nurses and school psychologists and social workers. Luckily, they said, there is money in this year’s state budget to do that.
Task force member Dwayne Cerbone, the president of the Pittsford District Teachers Association and the head of the Monroe County Federation of Teachers, said more work needs to be done to prevent violent situations from escalating in the first place.
Cerbone said in many cases, students know more about impending trouble than do teachers.
“Most of us as high school teachers, middle school teachers, we have a student for 40 minutes a day. So I may hear something second period that seems a little concerning to me; somebody else hears something a little later in the day. How do we open up that communication?” Cerbone said.
But he said they might not want to “tell” on their friends or classmates. The task force recommends setting up anonymous tip lines.
Cerbone said it’s also important to employ what are known as “restorative practices” after a student commits a violent or inappropriate act. It involves bringing in counselors, engaging with the family, and helping other students process what happened.
Finally, the task force recommends that the wide availability and large number of guns be reduced. They said there should be universal background checks for gun purchases and a federal ban on high-capacity magazines.
They also said the federal government should adopt laws similar to New York’s to restrict those under 21 from buying guns and to adopt national red flag laws, which allow a judge to order the seizure of weapons from a person deemed a threat to themselves or others.
