"G" is for Gun

School Protocols Don't Lend Themselves to Student & Faculty Safety, or "What Happened to Me Last Week."

The first priority of a school is to make sure every kid who walks through the door in the morning walks out safely at the end of the day. It's the tiptop of the list -- way, way above learning, hot lunch, and everything else. 

Priority Two is to avoid getting sued under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. 

Priority Three is to keep it all out of the press. 

Like the Three Laws of Robotics, any decision by a school’s administration filters through that triumvirate, often to the detriment of any of the priorities below. 

That’s why, at my penultimate high-school gig, when a gun fell out of a backpack onto the school-library floor, the teachers, even the ones whose class the gun had been in, were never officially notified of the name of the young man who came to school packing heat. (Never mind that we might run into him on The Out — it’s not that big a city.)

The students, unchecked by FERPA and with the tools of global communication at their fingertips, knew who it was, of course -- I’m surprised it didn’t make TikTok -- and any faculty member willing to go to that hyperbolic well could find out. But officially…

It’s the same set of rules that kept me from knowing, at my last high-school gig, that the step-father of a young man in my English class had held a gun to the kid’s head to get him to do his homework during the pandemic. His guidance counselor knew, but I, who worked with him five days a week, could not. Knowing might have helped me keep the kid from being shipped to a ‘special school’ later that semester but maybe not. 

The Rule of Three exists at the university level as well, usually compounded with a bad communication tree and a seeming inability to treat adjunct instructors like living beings.  I was reminded of this last week. 

I teach at a university as an adjunct English instructor, something I’ve been doing for seven years or so.  My class on Wednesdays starts at 12:30, but I try to get to campus before noon so I can grab a coffee and check my email in the Student Center. Outlook puts the most recent email on the top of the page so this is the message I saw first: 

I had not heard of a threat, so I scrolled down to see if there’d been an official notice.  I found this, which had been sent out at 7:47 a.m. as “An Important Campus Safety Update.”

I’ve been in education for a long time, and I know a “threat” can be anything from a student posting to social media to someone writing a death threat on a bathroom mirror in lipstick to someone phoning in a bomb scare. So, OK, Uncomfortable Student, no problem. Some students might use a threat as cover to take advantage of good weather, but who am I to judge?

I went back to the top of my email and opened the next student email. 

That, friends, is a very different thing. We live in troubled times, and I can’t help coming up with a list of “Most Likely To” in nearly every class. I surveyed my email again, sure I would have received official notice if one of my students had presented the threat, along with some instruction from Public Safety and Admin about what to do and how to deal with it in the classroom. 

There was nothing. 

I hastened to the dean’s office, hoping to get a sense of what was happening before class started. The Dean wasn’t in the loop, either. She didn’t know much about what happened, nor did she know the student’s name. I offered her my Number One Most Likely To, and she was unable to say it had not been him. She did say that the situation was under control and that it was unlikely that the Problem Child would be allowed back on campus. I asked her if I should cancel class, and she suggested that I do not in order to offer students the feeling that everything was all right. 

I went upstairs, and the first person I saw was my Number One Most Likely To. Whew! It’s not every day that you half expect the first student you see to pull a gun and shoot you! 

Now I could have made a scene, freaked out and screamed “Don’t shoot me!” but I played it cool, gave him the deadline extension he asked for, and through context clues, eventually sussed out that he was probably not The One.  Four students made it to class that day.

I emailed the dean as soon as I could to tell her that I had taken Number One’s name in vain. Later at home, whilst entering grades, I checked my email again and spotted another message from a student, sent the night before and thus far down the announcement-filled Outlook page. 

I may not have had any information about this thing, but the students sure did! They had his name and some idea of what he’d done. Threatened our class! Surely, some law-enforcement type or admin would reach out to me and give me some tools to work with, even an answer to an student question I received Wednesday night: “He won’t be back in class, correct?” (Readers, no such reaching out occurred.)

How could I answer the emailed question? Did I know? Was The Problem Child in jail? Was he being watched? Was it impossible for him to drive back to campus and shoot us all? I let my journalism skills and search-fu out, and found nothing in the news or local police records. (Dirty Secret: If a University’s own security and internal judiciary handle an incident, the incident likely will not become public record. This can include sexual assaults, threats, etc.)

I responded to the concerned student,“That is my understanding,” and on Thursday sent an email out to the members of the class: 

Was this the right thing to do? Was I violating some handbook protocol? Considering I’d heard nothing from The People in Authority about this, I wasn’t too worried. I didn’t even know Problem Child’s enrollment status. Getting escorted off campus after making threats seems like it would be pretty final. 

We had class on Friday, talked a little bit about it, but mostly bent our heads to the work. 

So, now, as I write this, it’s Monday. I checked my university email this morning, and the first thing I saw was a message from the Problem Child:

OK, so now this dude who was chased off campus for maybe threatening to end the lives of my students, end my life, and shoot up my classroom, wants me to accept late work, grade that work fairly, and enter those grades like nothing ever happened. (Did it happen? Not according to the Official Reaction. I was a reporter for a long time, and my search-fu is pretty good. Still nothing in my email, nothing in the news.)

Then I spotted this.

To my mind, this message provided very little context. All I know is, a student in one of my classes did something bad enough to get exiled from the campus, possibly threatening my life and the life of my students, and I am being asked by Admin, in its only official communication to me about this, to give him accommodations.  (If I don’t will he come shoot me? Is that something I should think about? What happens if I give him an A?)

And, honestly, the admin request merits the least of my outrage over this situation. At every turn, I’ve been kept in the dark, left out of information loops that I need to keep my students and myself safe, make informed choices, and reassure my students that everything was in control. 

I’m not happy. Worse, I don’t feel safe, and I don’t feel I have what I need to protect my students.  This sucks.