Saturday, September 23, 2000
Shootings
Lessons of Conyers, Columbine
Parents in Sycamore Community Schools had a chance to watch Survivor Thursday night — or to talk with a room full of them.
True survivors. Eight teen-agers, two parents and a youth minister who lived through the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., or Heritage High School in Conyers, Ga. They came to present Summit of Schools, a program they started to prevent school violence.
Their audience, blessedly, had trouble relating to their experiences. It had no trouble relating to their demographics.
“Every time there was a high school shooting, like so many other people in my community, I said, "Maybe it could happen there, but I know these kids,'” said Columbine parent Gail Schneider. “We're an academic, college prep high school. We're not in a low-income area. We've got a predominance of churches. We've got parks, great schools. Out of 2,000 students, 2,000 parents said it won't happen here. It can't.”
When it did, a thousand things were shattered, from lives to library windows, to the comfortable delusion that safety lies in silence and denial.
Silence, it ends up, is the most dangerous thing of all.
The Columbine and Heritage students advocated connection and interdependency, a hard lesson in an America where outdistancing one another is the very trademark of success.
They crusaded for family time, for the kind of annoyingly tenacious parents who push open the doors of privacy and self-sufficiency behind which teen-agers hide.
To leave your children alone emotionally or physically, they said, is to leave them vulnerable.
Yet those were the evening's easier lessons. The harder ones dealt with stepping across lines that schools, neighborhoods and groups of parents rarely cross anymore.
Courteous distance is one of the perks of living in the suburbs, and privacy is one of the rights. To advocate entering your child's bedroom is one thing; to advocate entering the private affairs of other families is quite another.
Columbine survivors feel they have that right. Neighbors watched the two assailants building the bombs that would tear apart Columbine High School. “Had they picked up a phone,” said parent and police officer John Lietz, “it might not have happened.”
If you see a pattern of troubled behavior, or hear a rumor of violence, “talk to the parents of the students involved,” Mr. Lietz said. “If nothing happens there, go to someone else. At least everyone knows to keep an eye out.”
Make your children your business. Make other people's children your business. “There will always be parents unwilling to take a stand,” said Heritage student Zach Moore. “When that safety net fails, there has to be another — another parent, a teacher.”
Classmate Kent Harris pleaded, “Don't be somebody who would push a kid away.”
Keeping them close, it seems, is the only solution.
“This issue is so big — it's like a 2,000-piece puzzle,” Mrs. Schneider said. “Each of you holds a piece. It's going to take all of us working together, one piece at a time.
“Please take your piece.”
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at the Enquirer, 312 Elm St. Cincinnati 45202, or krista_ramsey@hotmail.com
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