The following note from Principal John Ritchie was sent to the Wayland High School mailing list:
I sent the note below out to the staff yesterday, and am now sharing it with you, as I’m sure many of you have experienced many of the same feelings we’ve experienced here.
It’s hard not to be distracted (at least) by the recent events in Danvers, because when something catastrophic happens in a schoolhouse, it makes all of us who work in schoolhouses feel vulnerable, scared, alarmed. We are so familiar with the terrain of a school, the workplace that is a school, the students and colleagues who surround us in a school, that when a violent episode like this happens, we sometimes can’t help but imagine it happening in our own school.
Given my own history, you can imagine the trepidation I’d feel by simply saying “don’t worry, it couldn’t happen here.” But, ironically, because of that very history, and the amount of time I’ve spent thinking about school safety, I do feel as though I want to share some contextual comments. [Just by way of explanation, I was the Superintendent/Principal at Lincoln-Sudbury in 2007 when a ninth grade boy was killed by another student during the school day.]
In fact, serious school violence has been on a steady decline, ever since-paradoxically-Columbine. The main reason has to do with more resources having been put into counseling, prevention programs, early identification systems for troubled kids. And nothing to do with increased physical security systems. So while news stories that begin “Another episode of violence in a school, this time in Danvers” create a public sense that we are witnessing an epidemic that keeps growing, in fact we’re witnessing increasingly isolated and infrequent episodes, that are of course no less horrific because of their infrequency.
I think I’ve mentioned before that the more than sixty million school age children in America are something like 1,185 times safer when in school than at any other time of the day. There must be a similar statistic for how safe adults are while in school.
But statistics are statistics, and feelings are feelings. If any of you would like to get together and talk about how you’re feeling in the wake of the teacher’s death in Danvers, or would like any additional support of any kind, please let me know-or let someone know who could let me know.
John Ritchie
Principal
