Avoiding Another Massacre
School security focus of public safety meeting

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

WINDOW ROCK — It's more than the death toll of the March 21 school shooting on Minnesota's Red Lake Reservation that has surprised the nation.

What has many people especially worried about the incident which claimed a total of 10 lives, including the shooter's is that the school where 16-year-old Jeff Weise did most of his killing that day was considered well secured.

It's a point carefully noted during a joint meeting of the Navajo Nation's Education and Public Safety Committees inside the tribe's Council Chambers Thursday.

Awakened to the fact that such tragedies are not kept at bay by reservation boundaries, the two committees called the meeting to begin a public dialogue on what the Navajo Nation is doing to address the threat of such an event and what more it should and could do.

"It does obviously show that these things can happen anywhere," said Peter Stuart, a psychiatrist for the Indian Health Service in Chinle and the father of two children in the Chinle public school system. "This is not something that respects race."

But more than that, the gathered agreed, it proved that simply securing a school is not enough.

No matter what safety precautions a school takes to thwart a student shooter, said school resource officer Ron Brown of the Navajo Nation Police, it can't make a school invulnerable.

"That has been proven at Red Lake," he said.

Red Lake High School had all the standard security measures in place, said Acting Navajo Nation Police Chief Randy John: a fence, a metal detector, security guards, an emergency response plan.

None of it was enough to stop Weise from killing the security guard, walking into the school unchecked, and finishing his shooting spree before the police though quick to the scene even arrived.

"This was not a school that was not protected," Stuart agreed.

"If we believe we can protect these schools simply by having more security guards," he said, "we are dangerously mistaken."

Stuart, who has been dealing with the psyches of adolescents for almost 13 years, warned against making that mistake. If educators treat students like criminals and make schools look like prisons, he said, that's precisely what will happen.

Stuart tied increasing cases of school violence to a combination of factors, including troubled home lives, mental health problems and popular culture.

When he arrived on the reservation, Stuart said, only a handful of families had access to television.

"But as the cable TV and the dish networks came into our communities, that's also when the gang violence started to increase," he said.

Violent society
And what they see, he said, is a society fascinated with violence.

Because the tribe doesn't break down the incidence of firearm violations by where they occur, John said, he could not say whether more or less guns have been showing up at Navajo area schools over the years. He could recall only one school shooting on the reservation, non-fatal, that occurred at Shiprock High School a few years ago.

Public Safety Committee member Lorenzo Curley noted that all the warning signs Stuart mentioned already existed on the Navajo reservation.

"What I hear you saying is that the Navajo Nation is just waiting for something like this to happen," he said.

Stuart clarified his statements.

"What happened at Red Lake is not an indication that our kids are getting more violent as a whole," he said. "What it is is a cautionary tale of what might happen if we don't take care of our kids."

And the best way to take care of them, he said, was by focusing on prevention through community and family support.

"The most important thing we can do for all of these children ... is to provide more community and family support," he said, "because each day these children go home."

And the behavior they see at home, he said, is the behavior they learn from and emulate.

Return to tradition
He offered the example of the Zuni Reservation south of Gallup, which, when student suicides started becoming a regular occurrence in the 1970s, developed a program aimed at reconnecting the youth with their tribal traditions. For 10 years, adolescent suicides dropped to zero. When the program ran out of money and folded, they returned.

"That for me, really, is proof in the pudding that getting back to your roots really does help prevent violence," Stuart said.

Education Committee Chairman Leonard Chee and other tribal delegates seemed to agree.

"As I was taking my tea break," he said, "a colleague came up to me and said, 'I think you're barking up the wrong tree it's the home, it's the family we need to look at'."

Accountability
Education Committee member Katherine Benally blamed the nation's struggle with substance abuse.

"I firmly believe the culprit is alcohol and drugs," she said. "If we sober up our parents, much and many of our problems will be resolved."

She suggested holding Navajo parents receiving public assistance from the tribe accountable for the proper care of their children before they could access their benefits; however, the delegates didn't see any of that as a reason to neglect security.

As Public Safety Committee Chairwoman Hope MacDonald-LoneTree sees it, they're all pieces of the same puzzle.

"We need to think of the big picture," she said. "The big picture is prevention, how we prepare when it happens, how we prepare after it happens," she said.

That preparation is not happening everywhere.

Rena Yazzie, a Navajo-area education line officer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, said reservation schools under the Bureau's direct control have emergency response protocols but are just now beginning to devise plans to deal specifically with the possibility of school shootings.

"We're just now beginning to make plans for that," she said. "I don't think we've ever really given that thought here on Navajo."

But the Bureau's grant and contract schools, which have more autonomy, haven't been as quick to follow their advice, she said: "Some of the schools do have those plans in place, others do not."

Chee, for one, was not happy to hear that some Bureau schools were being given the option to simply opt out.

"We believe you're equally responsible for grant and contract schools," he said, since they were all Bureau property.

Tribal delegates also wondered why the public schools which host the vast majority of the reservation's Navajo students weren't in on Thursday's meeting.

Apparently, no one told them about it.

MacDonald-LoneTree said the tribe had forgotten to send them invitations, but would ask them to participate in future meetings.

She also said the Arizona Department of Education's comprehensive school safety policies were something the tribe could learn from, adapt and adopt.

MacDonald-LoneTree said tribal staff would compile the delegates' recommendations from the meeting and that the committees would meet again hopefully with an even broader array of stake-holders to continue to discussion.

"We feel that Navajo, as large as we are, is not immune to this kind of violence," she said.

"I think we all agree that this is a community issue," Chee said. "It's going to be a community effort."