Published by the St. Louis American - December 2, 2024
I really don’t know why there has been no concerted response. Maybe it’s because of the general chaos in this society that we don’t focus on the needs and concerns of children and youth. Maybe it’s because adults don’t really know how to respond. I refuse to believe it’s because we do not care. But when a student survivor of St. Louis’ first school shooting came to me for a platform to express her discounted pain, I wondered about us as a society.
That year saw the highest number of school shootings since Columbine, the first school shooting in 1999. The number of shootings have doubled since Columbine—417 and counting. This made our horrific tragedy historically unique because not only were we in that statistic, but St. Louis also became a school shooting trifecta: the shooter was an African American teen in an urban public school headed by an African American principal. There is much that we need to learn from our situation to share with other urban school districts and communities.
Some of us village parents rushed to Gateway Highway in the shooting aftermath to help students get connected with their parents. Some of us met in the days afterward to put our concerns in a document entitled, “Gateway Observations and Recommendations.” The document was sent to leadership at the city, police department, and school levels. The hope was to jumpstart a community-wide discussion that would address fears and engage in a healing process. It never happened.
Weeks before the second anniversary of the shooting, the SLPD finally released the edited video footage and a 432-page report to the media. The report revealed important information that the community needed to know, a community that is capable of developing realistic strategies that address the issues.
Other schools and communities around the country have rallied to understand their tragedies, explored lessons learned and worked together to implement programs and strategies. In typical St. Louis problem-solving manner, we have buried our collective heads and hoped everything would be alright—all by itself. It won’t be.
We know that now because in the last couple of years, reports have been published that studied the long-term impact on students victimized by shootings. The research coming out of Stanford University found that students exposed to school shootings face ‘lasting, persistent’ adversity in their lives. Other reports point to the negative impacts on students’ mental well-being such as the lack of school and job success, depression, drug abuse and suicide. The students and staff in this city are still suffering from the trauma of that fateful day. The trauma is there whether we acknowledge it or not.
It would be a powerful display of leadership to see the bureaucratic systems come together—the schools, public safety and city government—and hold a public hearing on what happened on October 24, 2022 and why, and to share their plans for more effective coordination in the future. The anxiety and fear remain real.
How will we know if the schools will be better prepared the next time if we never talk about it? It’s not too late to have that conversation. With each passing day of no intervention, the trauma is buried deeper. At some point, the trauma will be triggered and force us grown folks to get serious. Our young people are begging us for relief. How long will we ignore their cries for help?Note: Listen to student survivors reflect on their lives since the school tragedy on “Voices from the Battlefield.”
