DETROIT – Oakland County investigators have said mass shooting suspect Ethan Crumbley, 15, and his parents met with school officials the day of the shooting to discuss “concerning” behavior.
We are not sure what that behavior included, but the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office said it was not notified of any issues with Crumbley. Not long after that meeting, investigators say Crumbley entered Oxford High School with a handgun and opened fire on students and teachers. The shooter killed four students and wounded seven other people, including a teacher.
Could this have been prevented? That’s the question on a lot of people’s minds. And when do schools sound the alarm about students and why?
The practice of restorative discipline moves from pure punitive discipline: You do something bad, you get punished. With restorative discipline, the root of the discipline problem is more deeply explored while doing everything possible to keep the student in the learning environment, explained Dr. Steve Matthews, superintendent of the Novi Community School District.
“It really is a ladder of discipline, you know, and our goal is to keep students in school because we believe that need to be part of a larger, caring community, and if they are then they will understand there are certain expectations for better behavior,” said Matthews.
Think of school discipline as rungs on a ladder. There are specific off-ramps that are non-negotiable, according to Dr. John Dignan, superintendent of Wayne-Westland Community Schools.
“Student violence like fighting, the other one would be any kind of sexual assaults. Drugs, to a certain degree, especially if the student is selling,” said Dignan.
A first contact with a problem, depending on the severity, likely starts with conversations with the teacher to deescalate.
“A teacher may overhear a student in a classroom make a threat against another student. So typically if it’s a verbal threat the teacher will try to address it in the classroom,” said Matthews.
If the problem persists, the student and their behavior is elevated to contact with the school principal and likely school counselor. If that problem persists, or is egregious enough, parents are brought in.
“That’s when we start to use the tools like suspension -- short-term, long-term. We rarely, in Novi, get to the point where we expel students because we believe that students are learning and part of learning is making mistakes,” said Matthews.
Dignan said there is a fine line here.
“At the same time, you can’t kinda walk that line and compromise the safety and well-being of your school community ... so it’s a difficult dance at times,” said Dignan.
Oxford High School shooting has districts rethinking safety, discipline policies
Matthews, a warrior for his students and staff for many years, displayed something Thursday I have never seen from him before: Abject grief over what happened at Oxford High School, barely 30 miles from the door of his district in Novi.
“You know, it’s just hard. We understand our schools are supposed to be places that students come to because they want to be part of that community,” he said. “When incidents like this happens, it just hurts.”
It is the sentiment I am hearing from superintendents across our region, and it is why today they are rethinking everything.
“I think there’s a lot of self reflection going on. How can we make things better? What can we do differently?” said Dignan.
The Novi district has stringent safety measures. Its 6,700 students and 840 staffers must display ID tags at all times. Just getting into the building is a gauntlet of identification and scrutinization. But now Matthews and his administrative staff are reviewing interior security measures.
“Are we making sure that teachers get into the hallway and kind of monitor students coming and going. We’re going to talk to our teachers about making sure if students say they need to go someplace during a school period that we have a good sense of where they’re actually going and not just roaming the hallways,” said Matthews.
The Novi team is going back over old discipline records and re-scrutinizing them.
“Are there students in our school that we feel are on the periphery or on the outskirts, the outside, that could feel left out and could feel that they needed to kind of make a stand, or demonstrate or act out in a way that would be detrimental to that school environment,” said Matthews.
The same is going on in the Wayne-Westland Community Schools, according to Dignan, the superintendent of the 6-thousand students in that district.
“Just because we’ve done something for a long time in a certain way, is there a better way of doing it? I think probably a lot of school districts are going through that process -- what can we do better?” he said.
All districts are talking about strengthening touch-points for all students.