Remote Learning and School Shootings
By Albert B. Kelly
It was over Thanksgiving holiday, in one of those idle conversations we sometimes have with relatives we don’t often see during the year, that I shared the thought that I’m glad I’m not raising school-age children in this day and age given all of the dangers and challenges in the world. Not long after that, the headlines were filled with news coming out of Michigan about a 15-year-old shooting up his high school in Oxford Michigan; killing 3 of his fellow students and injuring 8 others.
Sadly, I was not shocked upon hearing this news and that’s not because the incident itself wasn’t shocking, we know it was for those directly impacted; I wasn’t shocked because school shootings have become such a common part of the landscape. How sad it is to realize that we’ve become accustomed to hearing this news. This wasn’t always the case and if you’re of a certain age, you can think back to a time when the reaction would have been shock and then perhaps outrage.
Maybe it was 22 years ago when we were able to be completely shocked by a school shooting as we first learned of the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado where 12 students and a teacher were killed. Maybe total numbness set in with the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School where 26 people were killed, including 20 first graders. It was in the wake of Sandy Hook that cynicism came full circle when the best we could do was “thoughts and prayers”.
In the shadow of this most recent shooting, I wanted to know how many school shootings had taken place in recent years so I looked. The numbers depend on the metrics used and the figures I viewed came from Education Week’s 2021 School Shooting Tracker. The number this year so far is 28 school shootings with a body count of 9 dead and 48 injured. In both 2018 and 2019, the number of such incidences was 24. But the number that stuck out to me was the 2020 number.
With the onset of the global pandemic and the need to shift to remote learning, there was a significant drop in school shootings in 2020, which saw 10 such incidences that left 3 dead and 7 injured. Of course the large majority of students, though not all, paid a high price as we scrambled to the online learning. There was no time to plan and the shift to remote learning was a seat-of-the-pants affair with huge consequences. Yet the lower number of incidents does raise the question as to whether there is more to unpack as it relates to school shootings.
What does it say about us that the thing that lowered the number of school shootings and the body count was not tighter gun legislation, not better security measures, not early detection and intervention, but a global pandemic that forced us into lock-down? How should we think about this issue going forward and is there data that the experts should be examining- something we’re simply missing?
While it is obvious to say that shootings were down because school wasn’t in session, there might be more to consider under the surface. It’s is true that school wasn’t in session, but it was also true that there were no occasions for bullying, no opportunities for kids to be targeted for isolation or exclusion by their peers, no chronic humiliation- no chance for the types of things that often emerge as motives after some of these tragedies.
In 2020 everyone was isolated in some way but for those most vulnerable to peer bullying and humiliation, was that isolation a form of protection? My point is that some students might actually thrive using a remote or distance learning model. With that in mind, is there value in developing a well-considered hybrid approach that lets certain students, perhaps those most at risk for bullying, exclusion, and humiliation, get their education without all the extra curricula fixins?
I hesitate to jump to quick and easy conclusions about any
group but I think there may be value in considering whether a provision for
remote learning might allow those who are most at risk for being bullied,
excluded, picked-on and humiliated- who might then feel so aggrieved that they
consider acts of violence- have a viable alternative as opposed to us risking
them becoming another statistic or a headline.