MaverickNH
NES Member
"The morning of the shooting that left four dead and seven injured they talked to his parents about drawings Ethan was making in class about murder and suicide, superintendent Tim Thorne reportedly wrote. “The student was immediately removed from the classroom and brought to the guidance counselor’s office where he claimed the drawing was part of a video game he was designing and informed counselors that he planned to pursue video game design as a career,” Thorne told parents, “At no time did counselors believe the student might harm others based on his behavior, responses and demeanor, which appeared calm.”VERY interesting reporting this morning: the superintendent, Tim Throne, is saying the principal and assistant principal were NOT INVOLVED in the decision to send the kid back to class.
Meaning, there was never a possibility to search the bag. One of those two would have been the ones to authorize that, at least here in MA. I'm guessing it's similar in MI.
Apparently, the entire incident was handled by "counselors." The reporting I've read leaves it unclear just what kind of counselors those were; not all school counselors are created equal. Many schools have "guidance counselors" (whose "counsel" is about what classes to take next year) and "adjustment counselors" (who do a lot more of what laymen would think of as "counseling").
From the sound of what I'm seeing, it seems to me that Oxford's version of adjustment counselors bear most of the responsibility here. They had him out of class for an hour and a half while the parents came in, had the meeting, and then wanted to send him home. Mom and Dad refused outright, saying they had to get back to work. The choice was to send him home to an empty house, or let him go back to class, so back to class he went.
Throne says the kid was calm and polite the entire time, quietly doing his science homework in the counselor's office, claiming the drawings were about a video game he was designing (a lot of students are into that shit, and adults buy it because they have no clue what the kids are talking about). He presumably had the gun in his bag that entire time. Throne, again, is saying the principal/AP weren't involved in any of these decisions.
As a guy who spends his working life at a public high school, everything I've just written sounds very credible to me. Every school is different, with a different culture and different roles and responsibilities for the grown-ups. My school would never, ever leave that situation solely in the hands of Guidance or the Adjustment Counselor; I think our counselors would have let the principal know when they pulled the kid from class, and certainly when the parents were told to come in. But my school is not every school.
But, to the point of my (and others') recent posts the last day or so, the TL;DR takeaway is that without administrator involvement, a bag search was probably never in the cards.
At some point, one has to wonder what it would take for councilors to believe a student might harm others…the "powers" schools claim from in loco parentis status and policies are quite useless if not exercised. In this case, the school is trying to cover butt and put all blame on the parents.
School shootings by students within school buildings, where the most access control and oversight can be applied, are rare events. Maybe schools in sh*thole cities see gang-related shootings more frequently outside building. There might be one or two schools that have ever experienced 2+ such indoor shootings - unfortunately, it can’t be judged whether schools really do up their game after a shooting or if rare x 2 is just too rare to happen.