The breaking news came in and what I heard was one of parents worst nightmares. To hear that a local elementary school had been the victim of such a violent act. On Friday October 8, 2010, A single gun shooter jumped the fence at the campus of Kelly Elementary in the Carlsbad area and began shooting at the kids.
The gunman managed to hit two second grade girls, 6 and 7 years old, they were both shot in the arm and both were eventually flown to Rady Children’s Hospital and are expected to recover fully from the gun wounds. But what about the mental scars that these kids, all of the kids that lived thru this ordeal will carry with them?
This was a case of a horrible situation with the best possible ending thanks to both construction workers who were working on a campus project and reacted bravely and quickly and to the fact that the gunman was a poor shooter and did not reload.
For many of us the question remains, can incidents like this one be prevented? are our school campuses too easy to access and a prime target for anyone who wants to make a statement or who looses their sanity?
First of all, everyone who knows something about securing an institution will tell you that if someone wants to seriously target any school, will find a way to do so, even if the campus was a closed off institution. Not only would it be very costly to re-design our schools and add security to each and every one, it might prove to be a deterrent but not a unusrpassable solution. And of course there is the matter of the cost of doing all this at a time where there are no funds available to keep teachers in the school roster, much less pay for everything that this would require.
Now, it is also true that new schools are still being built and many of them pay little regard to school safety from an intrusion point of view, so if we are building new schools, I believe we should be trying to make them as safe as possible from the get-go.
There should also be an assessment of the current schools to see if there are small steps that can be taken in each case to help prevent at any rate, an intrusion scenario.
However, I believe that the most important action we can take at this point is training. We need to train people on campus as well as students on how to react if such a scenario were to occur. Unfortunately, most schools do not have construction work being done at all times which means they wont all have well fit, willing and able construction workers to come to the rescue. And it should not be left up to chance to see if someone happens to be there that can aid the children.
We as parents need to prepare our kids as well and make sure that they know how to react in bad situations such as this one. We need to sit down with our children and discuss what happened and what they should do in a similar case. Many time we ourselves don’t know what is the right way to react so we need to get the school district to put such training and information out there so that it is available for everyone. We need to work as a community, keeping a constant eye out for things and people who may seem out-of-place or out-of-order in and around our schools and we have to let the authorities know immediately.
So going back to my question, are s to be learned from this incident? My answer is yes, in every incident there are always lessons to be learned. In this particular one I would say the most important ones are to be aware of our surroundings, be prepared, make sure the children are also aware and prepared and to work as a community.
If you would like to read the complete story on the School Shooting you can find it at http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/oct/08/carlsbad-police-respond-to-reports-of-shots-at-a-s/
If you have any comments, feedback is always welcome
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