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By
Paul M. Kingery
Little
progress has been made on school bullying since the 1999 shooting
rampage at Columbine, despite careful analysis of what happened
there and in other schools. More people have begun working
on the problem and resources are shifting, but in public schools,
weapons still are abundant, bullying is rife, administrators
and courts still wink at it, and the victims still have little
consolation or remedy.
In
No Easy Answers, Brooks Brown, a student at Columbine
High School at the time of the shootings, offers his own retrospective
view with help from his young journalist co-author, Rob Merritt.
Their book merits a careful read, with a discerning and gracious
eye, to unravel why they believe bullying should be condemned,
why artistic violence (such as singer Marilyn Manson's lyrics)
should be exonerated, why two youths in a matched set of three
would go on a murderous rampage that horrified the third,
and what this means for us.
Brown
was neither killer nor shooting victim, but was a friend of
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the shooters. Brown's role
was complicated and changed from witness to killers' friend,
police suspect, whistle-blower, advocate, activist and, now,
author. Brown, to a large extent, blames a culture of bullying
at Columbine for the murders. He also believes he understands
the killers better than we can, so if we can learn the subtle
differences between him and them, we will unlock "truths"
about what caused the murders and how to prevent another Columbine
in the future.
The
Differences
But
the authors are new at this. Their insights are important,
but their analysis and remedies fail. Brown was like Harris
and Klebold in some ways, fundamentally different in others.
Unlike Harris, he was not moved from state to state, and he
appears to have been more mentally stable. Nor was he the
introvert or follower Klebold was. Brown was not as disenchanted
with life as the others, not a vandal and not hopeless. He
claims we are only the sum of our experiences, yet his thesis
seems to be that the hopelessness with which his friends responded
to experiences that all three shared was the chief reason
they killed and he did not.
Across
the country, the knee-jerk response to Columbine was schools'
policy of "zero tolerance" against even trivial
"threats" such as carrying small chains or playing
cops and robbers. Zero tolerance is seldom used against bullying,
though. It has had no effect on weapon-carrying in schools.
It leaves bullies unchecked, removing more behaviorally disordered
and disruptive students, along with a number of good students
caught off guard by the shift.
Behind
this smoke screen, school administrators underreport the number
of firearms confiscated by as much as 100 percent and have
done little to make schools safer. Metal detectors and security
cameras may be more evident, but few schools try more effective,
comprehensive approaches such as increasing counseling, teaching
conflict resolution and anger management, reducing pressures
in the school and rooting out causes of conflict in the school
culture. Other effective approaches include mediation, recognizing
due process rights, more accurate monitoring of and reporting
on school violence, and more adults
at school.
Bureaucratic
Shuffling
Brown
and Merritt concentrate on Brown's singular story, as they
must. But an account of troubled individuals is only part
of the story of the school safety problem. Politics is another
part. The efforts of researchers and experts are poorly coordinated.
There is a need for leadership, especially among the three
federal departments working in this area. At the Department
of Education, the Bush administration recently reorganized
the Safe and Drug Free Schools Program. The new deputy secretary,
former Texas appeals court judge Eric Andell, must struggle
with inherited staff and systems problems. His predecessors
grossly underestimated the problem of firearms in schools
in the department's yearly reports to Congress and wasted
half a billion dollars annually, leaving little or nothing
to show for it.
At
the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Centers
for Mental Health in the Schools, in Maryland and California,
have been comparatively more effective, but they are underfunded.
The Center for Injury Prevention and Control (run by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention and HHS) is careful and
systematic in its research in communities and has built centers
of excellence, primarily in universities. But it has accomplished
little in schools.
Bush
has shuffled the staff at the Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention in the Department of Justice, where
they must now struggle to overcome three previous failed attempts
to create a vibrant national center on school safety and wring
accountability from the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Program.
No
Easy Answers is, sadly, aptly named. It is a decent attempt
to understand something about this crucial and still-neglected
issue. But as a nation, we must look further. With school
shootings down and the media and the president focused on
Iraq, we may not see improvements until or unless terrorists
begin targeting schools, as bullied, marginalized students
have done in the past.
Paul
M. Kingery, Ph.D., M.P.H., is an author, speaker and policy
advocate for school safety. |
