OXFORD, Mich. – Tuesday (May 10) night brought a packed school board meeting in Oxford with parents and students addressing school safety.
The meeting started with the board announcing an independent review of last November’s school shooting which will not be conducted until all criminal and civil litigation is over. And once again, the district declined Attorney General Dana Nessel’s offer for a third-party review.
Safety and security procedures were a big part of Tuesday’s meeting, but the students who packed the library at Oxford High School wanted to talk about their friends and how they think they should be remembered.
One high school Student after another shared the memories and thoughts about a proposed memorial planned for Hana St. Juliana, Tate Myre, Justin Shilling, and Madisyn Baldwin during the safety review.
“Maison deserves photos of herself on display,” said a fellow student. “She deserves a mural, statue, garden, anything, and everything to prove to the world that she is more than just another victim of one of these senseless preventable school shootings.”
The entire room stood in silence, in support, listening closely to what the students wanted, which wasn’t in line with what the district’s experts recommended.
We are the ones who walk into the school every day where we know our friends took their last breath, not the school consulted experts,” said another classmate.
Those experts the students were referencing thought a memorial with the faces of those who were lost could be a trigger.
“I forgot my best friend’s face is a trigger,” said another student. “But to who? Because I looked at it every day.”
The students say they can’t imagine a memorial without the portraits of their classmates that they love and continue to miss every day.
“Seeing pictures of her face would be reassuring to many,” said another student. “What we’ve been deprived of in our high school over the past three months. My best friend deserves more than what she was handed in life, and she also deserves more than a faceless banner used to memorialize her.”
