Overview:
School cultures are blind to internal threats, posed by students—prioritizing demotion and discrimination over risk assessment.
After the case was dismissed following the shooting death of teacher Abby Zwerner by a six-year-old student, the impulse to focus our anger on Assistant Principal Ebony Parker is understandable. I have that feeling as I read this case. Yet after twenty years of teaching in public and private schools, I suspect that an uneasy number of administrators may make the same decision. That is perhaps more disturbing than the failure of any one individual because it suggests a deeper problem within the school culture itself.
On Jan. 6, 2023, a first grader walked into his Virginia classroom with his mother’s 9 mm handgun smuggled into his backpack. Around 11:00, Abby Zwerner, her teacher told Ebony Parker, Assistant Principal that the student was threatening her classmates. Ms. Parker is said to have forbidden any teacher to search the child, because only administrators have the authority to do so.
Parker was quoted as telling staff to “wait” as “the school day was about to end and his mother was about to pick him up,” according to Zwerner’s attorney. Within an hour, the student pulled a gun and shot Zwerner twice.
Other professions, such as the pharmaceutical industry and law enforcement, often study catastrophic failures and near misses to build institutional memory for rare but dangerous situations. Schools rarely have the same honest conversations that are needed.
We can use a technique known as Root Cause Analysis, asking a series of questions until we get past individual immediate causes and find a deeper systemic issue that can be addressed. This technique was used after the explosion of Importer shuttle in 1986. The similarity between these events should be noted in that experts on the ground warned NASA managers of the danger before the launch but they were ignored.
First, we will ask: Why was Abby Zwerner shot on January 6, 2023? He was shot because a six-year-old child brought a gun to school and shot him twice.
Next, we will ask: Why was a child able to bring a gun to school?
It is said that people knew that the child had a gun, but when the assistant principal was told that the child had brought a gun to school, he said, “The school day is almost over, let’s wait and go out,” because the situation seemed to be under control according to the management.
The analysis usually stops once we have identified the person to blame. I understand the pressure. I personally am outraged by what happened and I want those involved to face serious charges. But we need to examine the story more deeply to uncover the systemic issues that made this happen. With that in mind, let’s continue our analysis to the third question.
Why did the situation seem out of control?
Schools often deal with escalating behavior using de-escalation strategies designed to defuse situations without resorting to punishment or emergency intervention. Over time, repeated exposure to difficult behavior can make situations seem more manageable than they really are.
And the fourth question: Why has school culture developed in this way? Elementary schools are institutionally developed to manage children’s behavioral disturbances, not vague death threats from very young children. The threats they face in elementary school are often associated with misbehavior, bullying, and chronic behavior problems, not deadly violence.
And finally, our fifth question: Why would this training create blind spots? Schools rarely clearly assess the potential for serious harm within the building. “Waiting” until the parent can solve the problem may be appropriate in dealing with a violent child, but it was a terrible solution when faced with a deadly threat.
If my analysis is true, then it is possible that this would have happened even if there was a different administrator.
Risk Assessment is not a moral abdication. After twenty years of teaching in public and private schools, I have seen time and time again that school culture stifles the act of openly discussing serious situations that threaten well-known students.
Discussions about difficult students emphasize the extenuating circumstances that explain why this student is challenging. There is an unspoken objection to blaming the student too much for his actions.
Home life, learning challenges, socioeconomic status, race or ethnicity, and other factors are often discussed when discussing struggling students. Any discussion that goes into the idea that the child is a threat or is responsible for their behavior is deflected or trampled.
Even when we train for emergencies we emphasize the concept of an external threat. Our lockdown devices operate on the implicit assumption that a hypothetical shooter is approaching the school building from the outside. We don’t explore the idea that the threat might come from within the house, so to speak.
There are good reasons to be wary of discussions that approach the topic of student risk. We do not want to discriminate or create bias among children at school. But we have to be able to discuss kids within the context of repeated red flags and make some kind of specific plan about how to handle those particular students when their behavior escalates. The mission of the school as an inclusive community cannot prevent discussing the worst cases if we want to avoid future incidents like this.
