reflection on Sandy Hook

Recently my blog has been reserved primarily for updates on the girls and our family, so I debated whether I wanted to post anything about the most recent school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  Now that we've all had a couple of days to begin processing the event and hear all sorts of experts weigh in via various media outlets, I decided that I would also give my two cents, both as a parent and a school administrator.

First, I don't want to engage in a debate about gun control.  The reality is that someone who really wants to do something usually finds a way.  In this case, the guns were obtained legally anyway.  I hear people saying, "If only the principal or teachers had had a gun ...".  That idea gives me pause; I don't know how I'd feel if carrying a gun became a required part of my job.  I can't say what I would do in a similar situation, but personally, I don't know if a gun in my hands would make a difference.

Second, I won't call into question Ms. Lanza's parenting.  We can't say that she enabled her son and/or didn't deal with his illness.  For all we know, she may have been shot as she tried to stop his rampage on Friday.  Maybe I'm wrong, but she's not here to say otherwise.

Just like you, my heart is broken for the parents who are burying their babies this week, just before Christmas.  And for the students who survived, how do they ever return to school?  Their innocence is gone.  It is absolutely infuriating.  My greatest fear isn't that something specific would happen to harm my children, but that anything would happen to harm them.  Although I refuse to let that fear paralyze or dictate me, I can't imagine going on without either of my girls.  I am filled with sadness for the parents who are facing such a stark reality after Friday's senseless shootings.

While I certainly don't have the answers, I absolutely believe that we need to turn our attention to mental illness.  Much mental illness can't truly be diagnosed until after adolescence, but we see signs of it in middle school.  Unfortunately, there just aren't the resources out there to help parents whose children are dealing with severe emotional disorders.  Often times, these kids score off the charts academically, eliminating small group or one-on-one teaching services, so they go from class to class like everyone else, but seriously struggle with all the stimuli.  Some parents, at their breaking point, are just waiting for the opportunity for their child to get arrested because the only help available is attached to having a record.  Just like suspension or expulsion won't change the behaviors of a child with mental illness, prison will not change the behaviors of an adult with mental illness.

There have been news reports alluding to the fact that the Sandy Hook gunman was on the Autism spectrum.  Please don't think that I'm confusing Autism with mental illness; I'm not.  But perhaps Autism (or Oppositional Defiant Disorder or something of the sort) was the cloak that kept the gunman's mental illness from truly being identified or treated.  It's just a theory.  However, even if the gunman was appropriately diagnosed and labeled during his school years, the reality is that the public school likely wouldn't have had the resources to properly serve him.  On a larger scale, our communities don't have a resource to serve such individuals.  Prison isn't the answer (and it only becomes the temporary answer because someone ends up doing something terrible, something that may have been avoided with the right social services).  For the record, I'm not pretending to know what those services might be, but there are plenty of experts who could help define them if the resources were made available.

As public educators, we open our doors and our hearts to every child.  Not just the smart ones or the kind ones or the ones from good homes.  I had a principal that used to say, "Parents send us the best kids they have; they don't leave the 'good' ones at home."  They send us what they have, and we love them  and teach them.  All of them.  Even the ones who, at the flip of a switch, throw desks and punch holes in the walls and cuss us out.  We love them through their failures and their struggles, just like we would our own children.  When the gunman was in first grade, his teacher would have shielded him from the bullets, too.  That's why teaching isn't a job; it's a calling of the highest degree.

Despite what we do for kids in our schools, and what their parents do for them at home, an individual with mental illness likely isn't equipped to live successfully without consistent structure and intervention.  When we turn them lose at the age of eighteen, it is so imperative that there is a system in place to keep carrying these people before the unthinkable happens, before we find ourselves in the position of having to be reactive.  At the end of 2012, mental illness isn't taboo; it isn't something we can wish away or quickly fix.  It is something we need to identify and treat to the best of our ability if we are to keep more tragedies of this sort from happening.  We can't eradicate evil, but perhaps we can find a way to appropriately serve those in such dire need.

May our thoughts continue to be with the families who lost loved ones, the first responders, and the survivors at Sandy Hook throughout the holiday season.