When less than a year after the Springfield incident, another even more shocking school shooting occurred, it cemented public fears and misconceptions about school violence beyond the reach of reason. On April 20, 1999, eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, conducted an assault on Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, a white, suburban, affluent enclave. Using semiautomatic guns procured at a Denver gun market and homemade explosive devices, they killed twelve students, one teacher, and then themselves within a half-hour. The death toll of fifteen, counting Harris and Klebold, was the highest of any school shooting. The news media, primed to cover Columbine because of the earlier string of incidents, mined every possible angle to create a dramatic parable of saints and sinners, good and evil. Every angle except two crucial ones: that school shootings were even rarer than ever, despite the brutal events at Columbine, and that it was easy access to automatic firearms that had given Harris and Klebold the ability to kill so many people so quickly. Even with Columbine’s terrible death toll, that school year had fewer student-on-student homicides than in 1992–1993.
In the wake of these incidents, elected officials scrambled to react with programs and policies to further penalize youthful offenders and to ratchet up zero tolerance disciplinary codes at the school level. Senators Orrin Hatch of Nevada and Jeff Sessions of Alabama introduced the Juvenile Crime Bill, designed to toughen sentencing of juvenile offenders, including elimination of the long-standing practice of separating incarcerated juveniles and adults. President Clinton held a conference on school violence, called for spending $60 million to hire thousands of police officers for schools, and announced a $12 million program called SERV—School Emergency Response to Violence—to help schools and communities cope with violent deaths. Clinton also asked Congress to pass legislation that would prohibit the sale of guns to violent juvenile offenders for life, a measure akin to closing the barn door after the cows have gone. This new breed of school shooter was more akin to a terrorist, the feds determined, and school violence should be elevated to the status of a national security threat. So post-Columbine, the Secret Service’s Threat Assessment Center was enlisted to study school shootings, producing the “Safe School Initiative” in 2002, which profiled the shooters—all males—who had carefully, not impulsively, planned their attacks, and who had easy access to guns (two thirds had taken guns from their homes or a relative’s). The two-year study also found that most shooters had exhibited behavior before their attacks that signaled their need for help, and bullying was a motivator in a number of incidents. The report concluded that there was no profile of a school shooter and that some attacks are preventable.
Each year since Columbine, the incidence of school crime and violence, including shooting deaths, has continued its downward trend, in lockstep with declining crime rates in society overall. Still, there have been several other high-profile incidents. On March 21, 2005, sixteen-year-old Jeff Weise, a Chippewa teen in Red Lake, Wisconsin, shot and killed nine people, including students at his school and relatives, and then committed suicide, using a gun he’d taken from home. News coverage invoked the specter of Columbine and quoted hand-wringing parents and school administrators worried about copycat shootings. The National Rifle Association offered its solution: let teachers have guns. In fall of 2006, the two previously cited incidents in Colorado and then Pennsylvania involving adult men invading schools and taking students hostage again invoked fears of Columbines erupting around the country. President George W. Bush responded like his predecessor did. He held a conference on school violence, even though neither incident was initiated by students. Pennsylvania legislators responded by revisiting a gun-control bill that had just been defeated.
President Bush continued the trajectory initiated by Bill Clinton of legislating punitive approaches to school security. His No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 continued the Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities program. One new provision required state and local education agencies to identify “persistently dangerous” schools, as defined by their own standards. Such schools risked losing funding and students. But early reports on this requirement showed state standards and definitions of violence varying wildly, with some schools reporting every push and shove, while others ignored serious incidents to avoid penalties. The provision also provided grants for drug prevention education, drug testing, purchase of metal detectors, and security guards. Funding was also available for conflict resolution and peer mediation education, but overall funding levels dropped after 2003—except for drug testing in schools. For a Republican administration that made accountability a cornerstone of its education policy, the Bush White House was no different from its predecessor in doling out funds without requiring measurable results from millions spent on drug abuse or safe schools efforts.
The only attempts to evaluate the Safe and Drug Free Schools program, which is now more than twenty years old, were undertaken during the Clinton years, and findings were dismal. A review by the criminal justice professor Lawrence W. Sherman for the Brookings Institute in 2000 called the program “symbolic pork” that Congress supports in order to show concern for a problem that constituents are worried about, regardless of effectiveness. “Since 1986, this program has given more than $6 billion to some fifteen thousand local school districts and fifty state governors to spend largely at their own discretion,” Sherman wrote. “No evidence shows that this half-billion-dollar-per-year program has made schools any safer or more drug-free. . . . Both the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office have tried to kill this program. Yet both Republican and Democratic presidents have joined with opposition parties in Congress to keep the program alive.”35 The public’s willingness to swallow symbolic pork instead of clamoring for meatier programs is evident in a lengthy investigative article published by the Los Angeles Times on the Safe and Drug Free Schools program, perhaps the only such journalistic examination by a national newspaper. Published after a year of high-profile school shootings in Oregon and Kentucky, the article found “gaping holes in government attempts to ensure safe schools,” formed by often bizarre expenditures of safe-schools funds. “In Richmond, Virginia, where a ninth grader shot and wounded a basketball coach and a teacher’s aide two days before school let out in June, state education officials spent $16,000 to publish a drug-free party guide that recommends staging activities such as Jell-O wrestling and pageants “where guys dress up in women’s wear,” wrote the reporter, Ralph Frammolino. He also found that “taxpayer dollars paid for motivational speakers, puppet shows, tickets to Disneyland, resort weekends and a $6,500 toy police car. Federal funds also are routinely spent on dunking booths, lifeguards and entertainers, including magicians, clowns and a Southern beauty queen, who serenades students with pop hits.” In one of his most disturbing discoveries, he wrote that months before the middle school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas, by two adolescent boys, local officials used some of the safe-schools funding to hire a magician to perform in the school.36
School violence as now understood and experienced is not a new phenomenon, but part of a continuum that stretches back in time. The particular safety and discipline challenges schools and students face have shifted as conditions outside the schoolhouse have changed. Guns are the most threatening part of the equation, and as long as children and teens have ready access to them, lethal violence will always be with us, in schools and out. While the vast majority of public schools continue to be safe—safer than students’ own homes or neighborhoods in many cases—addressing disruptive behavior and safety issues will always be part of the educational process.