Throwaway People?
....shifting the blame on school shootings.
Let’s talk about how we handle troubled teens who commit the horrific acts we euphemistically call “school shootings.”
Back in 2021, I wrote about Ethan Crumbley, the 15-year-old who had recently murdered fellow students at Oxford High School in Michigan and whose parents were also arrested and charged with providing him a gun and failing to address his mental health issues. Since that time, Crumbley has been sentenced to life without parole plus 24 years. His parents were both convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to at least a decade in prison. At the time of my 2021 column, early on in the case, I questioned why the parents were being criminally charged when, according to then-available news accounts, it appeared school officials had the opportunity to address Ethan’s mental health and anger issues, could have prevented his actions, and failed to do so.
In light of the recent horrors in my own state — the mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, Georgia — I took a look back at what’s happened with the Oxford High School shooting since it faded from the news cycles. As it turns out, the local school board commissioned an independent investigation of the shooting, and the resulting 572-page report issued last fall concluded that school officials completely failed Ethan as well as the victims of his violence.
Ethan came to school at Oxford High on November 30, 2021, and was found watching violent videos in class. This was just a day after he had been reprimanded for looking at pictures of bullets in class. His math teacher then became alarmed that he had written on his math assignment “The thoughts won’t stop” and “Help me.” School personnel found he had written other disturbing phrases on the paper – “Blood everywhere,” “My life is useless,” “The world is dead” – and had drawn images of a gun and a bleeding, bullet-ridden body.
Ethan denied being a “threat to himself or others,” but the school counselor and dean of students nonetheless called his parents in that morning for a meeting. They asked the parents to take him to a therapist, but the couple said they both had to work and couldn’t do it that day.
According to the independent review, “Because [the counselor] believed that it would be better to keep [Ethan] among his peers in a controlled, supervised setting, and because [the dean of students] said there was no disciplinary reason that would prevent [Ethan] from returning to class, [the two officials] allowed [Ethan] to remain at school.” Shortly thereafter, he launched his deadly attack.
The report found that the counselor and dean could have stopped Ethan and failed to do so. Investigators also determined that the school system itself was responsible for failing to adequately train staff on dealing with threats from students.
While there was widespread coverage of the shooting and of the prosecutions of Ethan and his parents, the independent report does not appear to have been discussed much in the media. Strangely enough, even though the independent report was released a year ago, the Michigan Board of Education seems to know nothing of it — board members recently asked the Michigan legislature to fund an independent investigation of the shooting. And while lawsuits have been filed against the school seeking damages for its failures, those actions were dismissed on grounds of governmental immunity and may go nowhere unless revived by the Michigan appellate courts.
Meanwhile, the news is full of articles touting the “eerie similarity” between the Oxford High shooting and our own Georgia tragedy. That may be true. In both cases, you have a young man who was experiencing a significant mental crisis that school personnel and other professionals didn’t take seriously, if the account of Colt Gray’s aunt holds true. You have government officials who could have intervened more forcefully: Gray’s prior threats allegedly were known to both law enforcement and school officials. Both shooters appear to have troubled histories at home.
And, if the Crumbley case is a good example, both families will see a child locked up for life; a parent held criminally responsible for failing to recognize the child represented a serious violent threat to the community; and little to no review of how systemic failures of school officials, child protection agencies, and mental health professionals may have contributed to this tragedy.
The prosecutor who successfully convicted both Ethan and his parents said that Georgia officials’ decision to pursue charges against Colt’s father took “courage.” Maybe. But one could also argue that a quick prosecution of a troubled teen and his family members without a deeper analysis of the situation just allows public institutions to avoid accountability. Sometimes, it seems, the school shooters and their families are just throwaway people on whom the public can dump their anger and desire for vengeance. And as the scapegoat is banished to the desert, everyone will forget to ask: what is so broken about our families, our society, and our systems of support that we keep producing angry, estranged teenaged boys who kill their classmates and teachers?
In other news:
Deborah Shropshire is suddenly out as Oklahoma’s human services leader following a meeting with the Governor.
Here’s another commentary on the issue of charging parents of school shooters from a Boston University law professor.
The inability of foster care providers to obtain liability insurance is a growing problem.
Stephannie Stokes has another interesting article out on the child welfare system, this time about policies that require parents of children in foster care to pay child support.
Tennessee is joining the “Every Child” movement.
The US Department of Justice has sued Maine over policies the agency claims inappropriately separate children with behavioral health issues from their families. The State has also put together a working group to address children with behavioral health needs who are stuck in emergency rooms.
Here’s a disturbing story about a mother who was jailed for refusing to have her children engage in “reunification therapy” with their father, who has been charged with sexually assaulting the couple’s daughters.
Minnesota’s Supreme Court is launching a working group to address child protection and child welfare.
If we missed any news or issues you think we should cover, let us know!