An End to This Madness
A little over a year after the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT, author Glennon Doyle published a post titled "Share This With All The Schools, Please" on her blog, momastery.com.
I love this post.
And after every headline since Sandy Hook detailing yet another tragic school shooting, some media outlet goes back to momastery and finds it and republishes it in the hopes that maybe this time, enough people will pay enough attention that things will change.
Because, you see, the teacher Doyle describes in her post was a truly outstanding educator who goes above and beyond for her students as a result of her profound understanding of the social-emotional responsibility that we in education have to our children.
But despite her valiant efforts, approximately 94 school shootings still took place in the U.S. between the initialization of her scheme by Harris and Klebold's massacre in Littleton (1999) and the publication of Doyle's post. While she worked quietly and alone finding one troubled child after another, news outlets across the U.S. carried scores of stories about the likes of Williams & Tate (2003), Cho (2007), Kazmierczak (2008), and all the rest.
And despite the publication and widespread dissemination of that teacher's highly effective method for honing in on troubled children like those mentioned above, since that post was first published after Lanza's attack in Newtown in 2012, a staggering 146 school shootings have been brought to the American public by a host of troubled individuals like Reyes (2013), Fryberg (2014), and most recently Cruz (2018).
So I'm left wondering, what have we done about it? Since we've shared Doyle's post with "all the schools", as she asked, how many educators have actually begun emulating "Chase's teacher"? Have we picked up her tradition of looking for the lonely kids in a systematic way week after week for more than a decade since so many of us first learned of her method? Is anyone actively seeking out the bullies and the bullied and helping to restore a sense of justice to their lives before they turn into killers?
ARE WE FOLLOWING ANY MODEL - ANY STRATEGY - THAT MIGHT HELP THE CRUZs OR THE FRYBERGs, THE REYESes OR THE LANZAs BEFORE THEY BECOME JADED AND TWISTED AND ANGRY?
ARE WE DOING ANYTHING TO HEAL THE KAZMIERCZAKs OR THE CHOs, THE WILLIAMS & TATEs OR THE HARRIS & KLEBOLDs BEFORE THEY TAKE UP ARMS AGAINST THEIR PERCEIVED OPPRESSORS?
An old friend told me the other day, when I brought up Restorative Discipline Practices on Facebook, that it was fine for minor offenses, but for major offenses, RP was tantamount to permission by the campus administration for students to do bad things.
I couldn't see then how to explain how wrong that thinking was, and he and I had to go back and forth quite a bit before we got on the same page. But in light of this most recent shooting and all these thoughts, I see it more clearly now.
And now, when people ask, "What are we going to do?" in the wake of another school shooting, I see a viable answer, just like Chase's teacher did.
We have to talk to our children. Every single one of them. We need to learn and put into practice a method by which we can actually reach the outliers and weave them back into the fold or get them the help they need before it's too late. Restorative Discipline is that
But we have to be willing to do the work. School administrators, we have to be willing to adjust our schedules. To make the time for ourselves and our teachers and, most importantly, our students. To take some the time we've given over to vaunted "tested subject areas" away, so we can spend time on our children's social and emotional well-being. (Psst...we'll get that time back when we have functional classrooms.) We have to be willing to learn some new things. We have to be passionate in our efforts to teach our people. We will ALL need to be open to some new ideas. To opening ourselves up to the community we serve.
And if we do that, if we as educators learn and become practitioners of Restorative Justice Practices, what we'll find is that we do, in fact, deal with the school shooter quite effectively through RP. Because we restore him before restoration becomes inconceivable. We bring him in to a community of others. We don't let him remain alone, imagining the worst of the rest of us, and making his delusions manifest when we ignore him to that ultimate degree that allows him the time and the wherewithal to descend upon our innocents in the midst of their perceived safety and annihilate them where they stand.
I love this post.
And after every headline since Sandy Hook detailing yet another tragic school shooting, some media outlet goes back to momastery and finds it and republishes it in the hopes that maybe this time, enough people will pay enough attention that things will change.
Because, you see, the teacher Doyle describes in her post was a truly outstanding educator who goes above and beyond for her students as a result of her profound understanding of the social-emotional responsibility that we in education have to our children.
But despite her valiant efforts, approximately 94 school shootings still took place in the U.S. between the initialization of her scheme by Harris and Klebold's massacre in Littleton (1999) and the publication of Doyle's post. While she worked quietly and alone finding one troubled child after another, news outlets across the U.S. carried scores of stories about the likes of Williams & Tate (2003), Cho (2007), Kazmierczak (2008), and all the rest.
And despite the publication and widespread dissemination of that teacher's highly effective method for honing in on troubled children like those mentioned above, since that post was first published after Lanza's attack in Newtown in 2012, a staggering 146 school shootings have been brought to the American public by a host of troubled individuals like Reyes (2013), Fryberg (2014), and most recently Cruz (2018).
So I'm left wondering, what have we done about it? Since we've shared Doyle's post with "all the schools", as she asked, how many educators have actually begun emulating "Chase's teacher"? Have we picked up her tradition of looking for the lonely kids in a systematic way week after week for more than a decade since so many of us first learned of her method? Is anyone actively seeking out the bullies and the bullied and helping to restore a sense of justice to their lives before they turn into killers?
ARE WE FOLLOWING ANY MODEL - ANY STRATEGY - THAT MIGHT HELP THE CRUZs OR THE FRYBERGs, THE REYESes OR THE LANZAs BEFORE THEY BECOME JADED AND TWISTED AND ANGRY?
ARE WE DOING ANYTHING TO HEAL THE KAZMIERCZAKs OR THE CHOs, THE WILLIAMS & TATEs OR THE HARRIS & KLEBOLDs BEFORE THEY TAKE UP ARMS AGAINST THEIR PERCEIVED OPPRESSORS?
An old friend told me the other day, when I brought up Restorative Discipline Practices on Facebook, that it was fine for minor offenses, but for major offenses, RP was tantamount to permission by the campus administration for students to do bad things.
I couldn't see then how to explain how wrong that thinking was, and he and I had to go back and forth quite a bit before we got on the same page. But in light of this most recent shooting and all these thoughts, I see it more clearly now.
And now, when people ask, "What are we going to do?" in the wake of another school shooting, I see a viable answer, just like Chase's teacher did.
We have to talk to our children. Every single one of them. We need to learn and put into practice a method by which we can actually reach the outliers and weave them back into the fold or get them the help they need before it's too late. Restorative Discipline is that
But we have to be willing to do the work. School administrators, we have to be willing to adjust our schedules. To make the time for ourselves and our teachers and, most importantly, our students. To take some the time we've given over to vaunted "tested subject areas" away, so we can spend time on our children's social and emotional well-being. (Psst...we'll get that time back when we have functional classrooms.) We have to be willing to learn some new things. We have to be passionate in our efforts to teach our people. We will ALL need to be open to some new ideas. To opening ourselves up to the community we serve.
And if we do that, if we as educators learn and become practitioners of Restorative Justice Practices, what we'll find is that we do, in fact, deal with the school shooter quite effectively through RP. Because we restore him before restoration becomes inconceivable. We bring him in to a community of others. We don't let him remain alone, imagining the worst of the rest of us, and making his delusions manifest when we ignore him to that ultimate degree that allows him the time and the wherewithal to descend upon our innocents in the midst of their perceived safety and annihilate them where they stand.
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