It's Been Said....

DO SOMETHING! A refrain used all too often following most mass school shootings. Do something ! Simple. Straightforward. Succinct Easily understood. Because that refrain is used so often following most mass school shootings, it then must also logically follow that there’s an ongoing problem with school safety, right? Are our schools as safe as they can be? It seems a whole lot of people think their schools are NOT safe and that nothing is being done to make them as safe as they need to be! But is that perception accurate? Well, yes and no. Arguably, one of the bigger problems I see with school safety is that when a mass school shooting happens, it’s become ‘normal’ for these incidents to dominate the 24-hour news cycle for a much shorter time than they used to. Please don’t get me wrong. They still garner a whole lot of ‘thoughts and prayers’, but usually for a much shorter period of time. The reality is they simply don’t get the same level of ongoing attention they used to. I should k...

Remember awhile back when there was a counter-movement to the March For Our Lives movement called  #WalkUPnotOUT ? While well intentioned, I personally believe that effort was an attempt to try and address bullying in schools and to place responsibility for doing that squarely on the shoulders of the kids choosing to participate in the walk-outs and the protests of March For Our Lives.   With that, who are the real bullies in mass school shootings? Really. Who are they? Soon after the massacre at Columbine High School April 20, 1999, rumors began circulating about the possibility that the two shooters who carried out this massacre had been the victims of bullying at the school. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. Whether they were or were not is a conclusion that, by its very nature, must be reached individually by each of us based on our own knowledge and on our own perceptions of the incident, itself. The fact is they, themselves --- the two shooters of Columbine, became bu...