Panel: Curb violence by teaching morality
M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News
Published October 10, 2006 at midnight
CHEVY CHASE, MD. — During a presidential panel on school violence that included Colorado Lt. Gov. Jane Norton, several participants talked about the need to incorporate morality messages in school curriculum to curb school violence.
The audience for panel discussions chaired by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings featured many representatives from religious organizations dealing with youth issues.
During a question and answer session, Darrell Scott, father of Columbine victim Rachel Scott, asked how schools can get more involved in building character.
"I really believe we must, more than just having programs available in the schools, integrate the messages of kindness and compassion and morality, and the way we treat each other," Scott said.
"Those things have to become a part of the everyday teaching and training in the schools."
Scott is the founder of a program called Rachel’s Challenge, a school training program inspired by an essay on ethics that his daughter wrote.
Rachel’s brother, Craig Scott, is expected to appear in a panel later in the day.
Other Coloradans prominent among the speakers including Park County Sheriff Fred Wegener and Del Elliott, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado.
President Bush called for the summit following the Platte Canyon High School shooting that took one life, and shootings since then in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Missouri.
The President and his wife, Laura, are slated to speak at the conference today.
Discussions earlier in the session turned to the use of school metal detectors and a crackdown on guns, but many participants said they believe the answers lie in changes to society itself.
"When the first call came out (for a shooting at Platte Canyon High School) I immediately thought it was a drill and someone forgot to tell me," Wegener said.
He said negotiations with the gunman, and talking to students who had been in the classroom, indicated there was a backpack the gunman said was loaded with C4 explosives.
"To me it was pretty real," he said of the threat of explosives.
He said this morning he made the decision to sent the SWAT team in after the gunman set a deadline.
When they entered, the gunman, Duane Morrison, 53, shot and killed one of the students, Emily Keyes, 16, before turning the gun on himself.
Wegener said that despite the situation in Bailey, "I still think our school is safe."
He said they went through the drills, had a plan in place, but the fact that Morrison was allowed into the school was an aberration.
Asked if the answer might be a crackdown on access to weapons, Wegener said, "The answer to your question is relatively easy. You just need to change society."
He said he used to have a shotgun in the rack of his pickup when he was a youngster. And it wasn’t uncommon for rural teenagers to carry Buck knives as well.
"We never thought of shooting or stabbing anyone with it," he said.
Elliott, the director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at CU, told the audience this morning that only one in five school shootings happens inside buildings where metal detectors might prevent a gunman’s access.
Elliott said that schools still are relatively safe.
Children have a much greater chance of being murdered outside of a school, he said.
But there has been an alarming increase of gang activity and violence in the past two years and the key is increasing crimestopper hotlines like those created after Columbine shootings, he believes.
"Our first line of prevention really is having good intelligence. The code of silence has largely been broken down because of Columbine," he said.
Thomas Cube, executive director and CEO of the Council of Educational Facility Planners, said it is important that school designs focus on giving teachers and administrators a clear view of hallways and stairways where violent people could hide, and to improve things such as access points and the overall size of schools.
"I’d like not to see metal detectors in schools. I think the metal detector, although it serves its purpose, sends a negative message to young people," he said.
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