Op-Ed
Source: Jimmie Kaska | Civic Media
Dec 18, 2024, 1:00 PM CST
Monday’s school shooting in Madison — a city I lived in for a few years and worked in for over a decade — is tragic. As a longtime advocate for kids and youth mentorship, a supporter of public education, and a current school board member in the district I live in, it takes a toll reading about the latest school shooting, wondering and worrying if it could happen where I live.
It’s an even more painful experience as a parent, especially with two elementary school students who have lived largely stress-free lives in stable, clean housing — something I personally hold great value in since I spent a couple of my teenage years homeless.
Each drop-off has its own routine: If my kids are in a good mood, which is most days, I make sure to tell them, loudly, that I love them. If they don’t say it back, there’s a megaphone in my front seat that is normally reserved for football practices, but during drop-off, has a much more important purpose: I call my kids out by their full legal name and say “I love you!” as loud as I can.
Obviously, being kids, having a parent loudly say this in front of all of your friends is “cringe” (or so I’m told). But this is the routine, and one that brightens up the mid-morning of my day, since it breaks up the time I spend writing, recording, editing, and posting news updates for the Civic Media network.
Monday’s news from Madison, as well as my fill-in guest-hosting appearance on the Civic Media network, extended my day past 14 hours. In the moment, talking about the shooting, writing news stories and scripts for it, and getting all of the audio pieces in the right place, you don’t think about what it actually means. There’s work to get done, and it has to weave around everything else that needs to be accomplished.
After work, after my kids were done with their sports practice and in bed, I finally had a moment to myself, and the stress of the story and the day hit me. I stayed up putting together my news scripts for the following morning, knowing that the leading story would continue to be the Madison school shooting. But, at this stage, after getting some time to myself, it was distracted work.
No episode found
Tuesday morning was like any other. I started writing news updates before my kids woke up and started recording after they got into their routine. Then went back into my office, shut the door (because they do everything — including brushing their teeth — at full volume), and began recording.
The lead story was the school shooting. It was in every news break, in some form: A proclamation to lower flags to half staff. The Speak Up, Speak Out hotline. Other school threats. The latest details on the shooting itself. I recorded one full newscast and loaded it, and then got ready to take the kids to school. When I opened my door, both of them were waiting there (the rule is they can’t come in if I’m recording), and we headed to the car.
Once we got buckled in, I double-checked to make sure the door was closed. Looked in the back seat to make sure they had seatbelts on. Counted the backpacks – one, two. Then, started to put my own seatbelt on. As I brought the buckle across my chest, I heard a quiet, heartbreaking question:
“Dad… What’s a school shooting?”
I almost didn’t hear him ask the question, but by the tone of my 8-year-old’s voice, I could tell he already knew the answer.
Stumbling, I asked where he had heard it, but of course, I already knew the answer myself.
“I heard you say it in your office recording news.”
I took a deep breath, and stopped the car at the end of the alley. “It’s when someone brings a gun to school, and shoots other people.”
I explained that it’s rare, although it has now happened twice in the past seven months in places we regularly go to in southern Wisconsin. I also said that if I didn’t think they would be safe going to school, I wouldn’t be dropping them off.
After a couple of minutes explaining that if they were nervous or scared and needed to talk to someone, they could find the school counselor or go to the office to call me or their mom, and telling them that if they saw something weird, to tell an adult, we did our drop-off routine. Both kids, seemingly over the gravity of the moment, yelled at the top of their lungs “I love you dad!” to avoid the megaphone treatment as they walked in with their friends. I left the drop-off loop and headed home, questioning every word I said in the longest 180 seconds of my life.
In daydreams, I envision myself running towards the school, daring anyone who gets in my way to stop me from getting inside to either deal with the threat or find my own kids. In reality, I know this is main character behavior, and I’ve always been a more behind-the-scenes personality. However, I am also fortunate to have gone years without encountering a truly dangerous situation, so I don’t know how I’d react, or if I would react at all.
In practice, it’s a question that has been asked of me several times as a school board member, because a large part of our referendum process was finding ways to increase our school security.
My first committee meeting in the referendum process was putting together a community survey. A portion of the questions dealt with school security. The goal of the survey was to find out what our community members valued as priorities to help guide our work in the referendum process.
It’s no surprise that the results came back with “safety” at the top of the list, and by a good margin.
At the outset of the project, I learned most of the school buildings in my district are aging, including one for the youngest students in the district that was built in 1898. A goal of the referendum was to consolidate the number of educational buildings from four to two. That move would eliminate the need for students to walk across the street for lunch and certain classes, like music or art, and give district staff fewer spaces to monitor during the day.
After the referendum passed, the district began using some of its funds to update its security systems: Better and connected intercoms, personal identification-verified digital visitor badges, secure vestibule entry, an updated alarm system. It also increased funding for a school resource officer.
Discussions and designs on the new entryways and windows were what caught my attention in various meetings, because I learned about shatter-resistant film, the different levels of bulletproof glass, and windows designed to only open one direction.
I also got to hear about how common school spaces were being redesigned to provide better sightlines for staff to check entrances, with obscured sightlines into classrooms (some of the windows in the referendum addition are so high I can’t stand and look through them, for example, but do provide more natural lighting).
All told, between several board and committee meetings, design presentations, and talking to people who specialize in school security either by invite to our district or at the state education convention, I have learned quite a bit about how districts are working within their means to make things safer for students.
When I’m asked what our schools can do to make things safer in the context of my role a a board member, I point to all of the changes that have happened in the last few years.
None of the updates were free, of course. All of the money used to secure the school buildings comes out of the funding we have to educate students, add classrooms, pay for teachers, and keep the lights on. As nearly everyone in Wisconsin knows, school funding is a controversial topic politically, and it’s also complicated. A record number of school referendums this year is an indicator that districts don’t have enough money to work with.
That’s why many referendums are written with “security updates” in the description. Of the 139 referendums on ballots in the fall, 40 of them included the word “security” in the ballot text. That way, approved referendum funding could be used to help update entryways, replaced broken or aging windows and doors, or add electronic systems for access, monitoring, or alerts.
Another way schools are increasing security efforts is by holding regular training and simulations. These range anywhere from making sure doors are locked all the way up to an active shooter drill with local law enforcement, but these sessions are meant to help in developing safer responses to threats in schools.
Without funding, policy changes, or political appetite for change, these are the most common ways schools are working to improve security. However, the two most-cited solutions to the school shooting epidemic — mental health services and placing armed guards (or arming teachers) — are expensive, especially for smaller schools.
One of the common replies in any mass shooting social media thread is that not enough is being done to address mental health (as if the stigma of neurodivergence isn’t enough… but that’s a topic for another day). Mental health services are seriously lacking in Wisconsin, particularly for young people. Pediatric therapy is expensive, and as I’ve personally experienced, is also difficult to find, especially in rural areas. Not many families can readily afford regular mental health care, even with insurance. Even with a hypothetical lower price for these services, there aren’t enough specialists to handle the caseload.
School districts also lack the capital to invest heavily into psychologists and counselors, especially in the districts dealing with the loss of funding due to declining enrollment. While the Department of Public Instruction is providing some smaller grants and funding to address the issue, it’s still short of the needs that schools have. It’s why the state superintendent is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding in the upcoming biennial budget to improve mental health services.
The DPI also recently received a $10 million grant to help with staffing for youth mental health services from the U.S. Department of Education.
Regardless of the financial means to address mental health in young people, much like how physical health is unique to each individual, mental health is as well, and the infrastructure to deal with not only the regular care needed for kids but the trauma of school threats, news reports of school shootings, or seeing someone hurt with a firearm does not exist like it does for physical care.
No episode found
I’m not the person with the answers to how to easily or quickly fix this issue, even though I’ve worked to educate myself on it as a school board member, parent, and someone with an interest in creating better situations for kids to thrive in. When I was in school, active shooter drills, bulletproof backpacks, and the different types of shatter-resistant glass for classroom doors were not part of reality. Today, with the normalization of school shootings, districts have had to invest in projects like retrofitting outdated buildings with secure entries and renovations to school layouts to mitigate some of the risk of a mass shooting — that’s not how any of this was 20 years ago.
It shouldn’t (and doesn’t have to be) this way. But in all the things I am part of with regards to education, including my role as a parent, I can only be one voice in the room where I live to advocate for something better. There is little chance that elected officials will address the issue outside of tweeting condolences at constituents, so it’s up to us as members of our local communities to use our increasingly limited resources to make schools — and all of our public spaces — a safer place.
How I am, personally, working towards this is not a copy-and-paste approach; I have spent most of my adult life advocating for kids through mentoring, volunteering, coaching, broadcasting, and other projects, and my experiences are largely rooted in being a resource for kids that might not have any. Why it matters to me is that I could count on one hand the number of reliable adults in my life as a kid, and they were all at my public school.
In the past 20 or so years, I’ve put in thousands of hours into this idea, with countless conversations about education and related topics. Professionally, I’ve broadcast thousands of high school sporting events, with the idea that promoting education-based activity provides a service, because studies show extra-curricular participation provides direct benefits for students.
None of it prepared me for the talk I had with my own kids the morning after the Abundant Life Christian School shooting, which is an hour and a half away from home.
The other common refrain in online discussions after school shootings is that districts should employ armed guards or train teachers to use a firearm. Putting law enforcement in schools is fairly common in Wisconsin, to the point that it’s even mandated by statute in the state’s largest public school district. However, school resource officers usually serve other purposes in a building other than someone screening everyone who comes into a school.
Government studies suggest that putting guns in the hands of teachers, no matter the intention, has no proven benefit. Having a firearm in a setting with children comes with inherent risks, and the time in securing a firearm or recovering it in a moment of crisis, especially for people in a profession that hasn’t, historically, needed to arm themselves also comes with obvious caveats.
As public sentiment remains split on the topic of arming teachers, some states have begun allowing it. It’s an idea also supported by Republicans and President-elect Donald Trump. However, most education groups and advocates are against it as a realistic means of preventing or deterring school shootings.
With polarization causing gridlock in federal and state government, it is unlikely that any meaningful legislation addressing gun violence will be passed, leaving it up to school district administrators to decide how much they can afford to take out of general funding — what districts use to pay teachers and staff, buy materials, and keep the lights on — to afford armed officers, security technology, and building infrastructure to address the issue locally.
Luckily for me, my kids (who are still pretty young) seem to genuinely trust me and my partner. As difficult as it was to have the talk with them, it was an opportunity for us to be transparent about a major issue facing kids in school today, something that may be better discussed with us as parents than with kids in the hallway or on the playground. I truly believe if my kids weren’t safe in school, they wouldn’t be there, and my role at Civic Media would probably change to accommodate some form of home schooling. But, I’ve been in the room for our district talking about this issue, discussed and voted on security measures, and gone out of my way to learn as much as I can to make sure I’m making an informed decision.
I’m not completely free of apprehension because school shootings can happen anywhere, anytime in America, and in rural Wisconsin, guns are literally everywhere. I don’t think anyone ever feels truly safe in this environment. It’s far from enough for me to stop sending my kids to school.
In the 24 hours since my 8-year-old quietly asked me what a school shooting was, we as parents were able to have the tough talks on not only telling an adult if they see something strange, but on treating people with kindness, on avoiding threatening language, on talking to someone they trust (a counselor, a teacher, us as parents) if they are worried about it. It is not something I experienced as a kid; no one ever warned us of the dangers of someone bringing a gun to school or what to do if someone did. Growing up in the sticks, a bunch of the vehicles in the school parking lot had hunting rifles on gun racks plainly visible in the window.
Times are different. As difficult as the question was, I’m grateful that I had some background in the subject to offer something more than “it probably won’t happen here.” It also gave me time to listen to their concerns and let them ask other tough questions, some of which I had no answer to because it’s impossible to predict the next time that something like this will happen.
Unfortunately, living in the U.S., the answer to that is probably soon, and then other parents will have to answer the same question I did on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday morning on the way to school drop-off.
“Dad… What’s a school shooting?”
Unlike the families in Madison who waited hours for reunification on Monday, I had an ordinary pick-up on Tuesday as well, and for that, and every day so far that it has been this way now, I remain grateful for the ordinary pick-up and drop-off routine.
The Speak Up, Speak Out Resource Center provides communities with a centralized safety tool, available at no cost to schools. It’s a one-stop resource for threat reporting, threat assessment consultation, critical incident response, and general school safety guidance. Email us at [email protected] or call 1-800-MY-SUSO-1.
To submit a tip, you can visit the Speak Up, Speak Out website. If it is an emergency, call 911.
You can find more resources for school safety on the Wisconsin Department of Justice website.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not representative of any specific school district, school board, administration, or educational governing body. They also do not represent Civic Media, its employees, partners, or sponsors. The views contained here are my (Jimmie Kaska) own, and my own only.
