America in the wake of the Florida high school massacre
Valentine’s Day is normally a day celebrated by loved ones and couples of all ages by going out to dinner, going to see a movie or other miscellaneous events. However, Valentine’s Day 2018 was the day the earth stood still in Parkland, Florida as a former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School walked into the building with a loaded gun, pulled a fire alarm to lure students out into the halls and opened fire.
By the time the former student, Nikolas Cruz, was in custody, 17 people were either dead or would be confirmed dead by the end of the day.
Among those dead were 14 students, a football coach who shielded a group of students from gunfire, an athletic director and a geography teacher.
As SWAT moved into the building sending students running out into waiting arms of their loved ones, many students took the time to talk to some of the reporters who were waiting for comments.
Many students told news outlets such as CNN, CBSNews and Time that Cruz had been flagged as a violent student before being expelled.
Eddie Bonilla, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, told NBCNews that Cruz “threw jokes around that he’d be the one to shoot up the school.”
Melissa Reeves, Ph. D., adjunct professor of psychology at Winthrop University, a nationally certified school psychologist and school crisis specialist, has firsthand experience with the role of the school psychologist and crisis events such as school shootings.
Having been one of the first to respond to the Columbine shooting in 1999 and working with the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut in 2015, Reeves expressed that the role of the school psychologist in the event of a school shooting is limited in the schools.
“The role of the school psychologist varies tremendously from district to district,” Reeves said. “What schools are beginning to do, this is a process, is for schools and school districts to establish what we call behavioral threat assessment and management teams and suicide risk assessment teams. This way if you have a student who is making threats to harm themselves or others, you have a team of trained professionals who know the types of questions to ask, they determine the level of risk, and put together a plan in regards to how are we going to manage or intervene in order to help this individual down a more positive path.”
Many people blame school psychologists from not preventing the shooting, but Reeves made it clear that it is not always so cut and dry because most schools and school districts have low budgets.
“Schools have limitations to what they can do,” Reeves said in regards to individuals such as Nick Cruz. “[Schools] are underfunded, under resourced and are not 24/7 mental health facilities. Our challenges in schools are a lot of times unattainable and difficult to find because even the community resources are underfunded.”
According to Reeves, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School tried to put a lot of those interventions in place, but his needs went beyond what the school could do.
Many future educators have expressed their fears of going into middle and high schools within the next few years because of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre.
“I never used to be afraid of going to work in the high schools,” junior English education major Jesse Foxwell said. “But seeing how easy it was for this kid to walk down the halls murdering students and staff alike, frankly, I’m terrified.”
Reeves said that restricting weapons could help fix the issue.
“This is a very complex issue,” Reeves said. “And it’s a societal problem. The bottom line is there’s way too much accessibility to weapons and these individuals shouldn’t have access to weapons. If they don’t have access to weapons that can harm people, we have a better chance at managing this behavior, but when they get ahold of a weapon then it becomes harder to manage the behavior.”
Many educators both current and future agree that if the accessibility to weapons were to become stricter, than the fear of incidents like the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, Columbine and Sandy Hook Elementary School will decrease.
