Post-Parkland

This semester, one of my students took his own life. He was in my 1st period, a class with 35 students.

I only had him for four weeks before he committed suicide. After such a short time, I couldn't have known him well enough to recognize what was going through his mind. But I've still struggled with an insistent nagging that I should have known, and I've spent the rest of this semester in a state of analytical paranoia, scouring the journals and essays of my remaining 92 students for signs of suicide and depression.

A couple of weeks ago, a mother of one of the girls in that same class called to yell at me. My daughter is struggling with depression. Why didn't you notice? Why didn't you do something? How could you be so insensitive?

Missed it again.

Last night, I dreamed that I was shot by a school shooter.

That probably feels like a cruel non sequitur, but I don't mean it to be. I have spent the past four years of my teaching career pretending that I live in a world where school shootings are not a thing. How else could you go to work every day? But the week my student took his own life and the week a troubled teen in Parkland, FL took the lives of seventeen innocent students? That was the same week.

I can't get it out of my mind, those two intertwining tragedies.

As much as we wish for a magic formula to identify potential school shooters, researchers who study these incidents say that shooters do not follow a consistent profile. Despite the impassioned anti-bullying pleas on social media, the truth is that bullying has been a factor in some cases, but not all. Diagnosable mental health issues like schizophrenia have been a factor in some cases, but not all. Loners...some but not all. Prior criminal records...some but not all.

So what can we say about the profile of a school shooter? In nearly every case: White. Male. Has displayed signs of suicide and/or depression. Has hinted at his plans to friends, on social media, or in class assignments.

Post-Parkland, the pressure as a teacher to identify and rescue feels so much heavier. Meanwhile, my class sizes keep getting bigger and bigger. Does 35 sound like a reasonable class size to you? Good, because next year you should expect 36. And you might be asked to carry a gun.

North Carolina teacher to student allotment 1:29.
NC counselor to student ratio 1:400
NC school psychologist to student ratio 1: 2100.

When you choose to be a teacher, you go into it knowing the job is more than just teaching lessons and grading papers, but how many balls can one person keep in the air at one time?