The Emergency poster within every classroom tells students how to react to different emergency situations, including a lockdown. Photo by Avery Lowther.
Trigger warning: Mentions of suicide and a personal account of violence
Lilo and Stitch plays in 11-year-old Miah Cerrillo’s classroom when teachers find out that there is an active shooter in the building. Cerrillo’s personal account from CNN describe her teacher going to lock the door when the shooter was already there. Cerrillo and her nineteen other peers watch as the shooter locks eyes with the teacher and says, “Goodnight.” The shooter releases open fire within the classroom, shooting Cerrillo’s peers and leaving her with fragment wounds. Out of fear, Cerrillo turns to her classmate whose dead next to her, and smears herself with her classmate’s blood to play dead. She says felt as though she laid “dead” for three hours.
According to Drs. Gary R. Walz and Jeanna C. Bleuer of Counseling Outfitters, school violence within the United States as seen a 19 percent increase as of the 21st century. Similar studies have concluded that students living within the United States are 13 times more likely to die by a firearm than in Scandinavian countries. Consistently, there have been warning signs of mental health issues within the perpetrators of these atrocities. From friends of the attacker noticing signs of mental health issues, to cryptic messages and alarming behavior, school shooters tend to have underlying issues causing the attack.
Evidence from Walz and Bleuer show that school shooters and a lack of mental health proactivity correlate. Only one third of shooters ever received a mental health evaluation before the incident. Despite the 78 percent of shooters with suicidal thoughts and attempts prior to the shooting, only about 17 percent of shooters actually got diagnosed with a mental illness. Neglecting students’ mental health can easily lead to aggression and resentment within students struggling.
Students who lack positive reinforcement such as academic success, positive relationships, and support from adults are more likely to develop negative tendencies that are similar to that of school shooters (Walz and Bleuer). Increasing awareness with mental health in modern America is essential to reducing school shootings. Before resorting to gun control, which could easily lead to an increase in underground weaponry exchange, schools must help students with the core issue.
Generally, school shooters don’t have psychotic disorders or other severe mental health problems. According to Columbia University Department of Psychology, only about five percent of shootings are related to severe mental illness. In most cases, students who cause violence in school suffer with incidental mental health struggles such as having challenges coping with severe and acute life issues, nihilism, anger, and a feeling of emptiness. These issues can snowball unnecessarily into larger mental health issues if untreated.
The struggles these students face are mental health issues, but they aren’t permanent. Therefore, students can come out of it as long as we treat mental health, especially among the male population, with proactivity. This not only means counselors pushing mentoring, educational, and extracurricular opportunities, but every adult within the education system being supportive.
“Sometimes what happens is a student will feel a lot of support and encouragement from a social worker. But then they’ll go back into the school and may not receive the same understanding from the teacher, the principal, the security guard, whomever. So in a whole-school program, everybody needs to be relating to and engaging with each other over students who are experiencing difficult things in their lives.” said Joe O’Callaghan, the head of Stamford Public Schools social work department in Connecticut in an interview done by The National Education Association.
