How some Oregon schools are addressing gun violence

Nearly a quarter of K-12 teachers in the U.S. reported going into a gun-related lockdown last year, according to new data from the Pew Research Center. Researchers also found that most teachers experience some degree of worry about the possibility of a school shooter. What does gun violence look like right now in Oregon schools, and what are districts doing to address threats and concerns? Andrea Castañeda is the superintendent for the Salem-Keizer School District. Mark Mulvihill is the superintendent for the InterMountain Education Service District, which serves Baker, Union, Morrow and Umatilla counties. They join us to answer these questions and more.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to the issue of gun violence and school safety. According to new data from the Pew Research Center, nearly a quarter of K-12 teachers in the US reported going into a gun related lockdown last year. Researchers also found that most teachers experience some degree of worry about the possibility of a school shooting. These concerns are real as KGW reported recently, 48 students statewide were disciplined during the last school year for bringing a handgun, a shotgun or a rifle onto a K-12 campus.

We’re going to get two perspectives on this issue right now. Andrea Castañeda is the superintendent for the Salem-Keizer School District. Mark Mulvihill is the superintendent for the InterMountain Education Service District which serves Baker, Union, Morrow and Umatilla counties. Welcome to you both.

Andrea Castañeda: Thank you. So happy to be here.

Mark Mulvihill: Glad to be here, Dave.

Miller: Andrea, first. For people who missed this news, can you remind us about the tragic incident at Bush’s Pasture Park just a few blocks from South Salem High School in March?

Castañeda: Yes, absolutely. It was an event that really did rock Salem and Keizer as a community and certainly us, as a school community. So around midday, we had a tragic event involving a number of young people. But in the end, there was a student who did lose his life and other students that were involved in a shooting at a park that is so close to our high school that it almost feels like an extension of the campus.

Part of what that event also triggered was our safety systems doing exactly what they are supposed to do, which is assessing risk nearly instantaneously and then triggering a series of precautions. In this event, because it was an incident involving a shooting of unknown participation and because we had students flowing back inside campus, it triggered our maximum security response. Maximum security response means there is a possible threat in our building, blockade yourself in the classroom, hide and go on to your highest levels of alert.

And I just briefly want to describe that that is a terribly traumatizing experience for over 2,300 students and staff because for more than an hour, they did believe that there was a shooter inside their building. So they were pushing furniture against doors, refrigerators against doors, trying in some cases to arm themselves with whatever they could find in their classroom. And we continue to work through the long emotional tale of both sides of the event–the shooting itself and then the experience that our community had in our school.

Miller: What does that mean in practice, working through that, the long trail of the traumatic aftermath of the actual killing and of a student and others being involved, as well as thousands of teachers and staff dealing with the fear and uncertainty for a good chunk of time? For the last two months, what have you been doing?

Castañeda: In the immediate aftermath, our staff did a spectacular job catching each other but really for focusing on students and giving students the time and space they needed to talk about their experience. We had on site counselors, we managed a whole crisis response team for the community, in this instance, not just the affected school, but also the schools that are close to that school because siblings are in those schools as well. And so you can imagine all the text messages going back and forth as our young people are in a barricade situation.

We’ve also had community meetings, neighborhood association meetings. We’ve worked with faith leaders and community organizations because this event, though localized around one moment and one high school, is actually an event that demands our attention around gun violence generally in the community, not just with youth and not just with schools.

Miller: Mark Mulvihill, education service districts, as some of our listeners may know, have a pretty unique operating model. You offer a variety of services to a whole bunch of K-12 districts – in your case, 21 districts in four Eastern Oregon counties – as opposed to having your own elementary or middle or high schools, as opposed to being what a lot of people might think of as a district. What does that mean in terms of the way you think about school safety?

Mulvihill: Well, first of all, I’m just listening to Andrea and watching the expression on her face and the emotion. We have a serious problem in America. And as she stated, this isn’t the school issue. This is a societal issue. And schools often are really the area where societal ills come in and we get to work within this. This is the conversation we have to have at every single level of protecting our children, protecting our staff on the situation in America. I just want to start with that as I listened to this and I looked at Andrea and what they went through and the emotional toll of what these events do because they leave permanent scarring in a community when they happen.

To answer your question, Dave, we look at this really as a regional, as a systemic type of activity. We’ve taken school violence and school safety very seriously. For many, many years, regionally, our districts have all worked together to implement the “I love You Guys” Foundation work and basically, that is getting a common vernacular for preparation for events. Every year, we host a safety summit. The real key is working with local law enforcement and first responders for our area, which covers such a large geographical scope. And we’re working with sheriff’s departments, local police, Oregon State Police, and it requires a different way of looking at the collaboration because of the sheer distance in between.

But, fortunately, we have not had an event right now. We’ve worked very hard to be proactive. The key piece… a lot is prevention. Andrea was talking about the kind of social emotional prevention. We’ve worked very hard on that. In fact, we piloted the Safe Oregon Tip Line, which really has been successful, where the community members, anybody, can refer to any type of an issue. And there’s a 24-hour monitoring system that then reports to the schools. So we have actually headed off a lot of possible threats to our schools, but it takes a holistic approach. We work very, very hard on it. But the emotional piece is really something… and I’ve been in this for 37 years and I never thought I would be reviewing ballistic film on windows, that that would be part of my job educating kindergartners and 17 year olds. But it is.

Miller: Meaning, making decisions about what kind of glass or film is going to stop a bullet?

Mulvihill: Yes. There’s film that can be applied onto windows to help prevent that.

Miller: So that is a part of your job as an educator now?

Mulvihill: Yes. And, again, as I was saying, that I’ve been in this for a long, long time. I never thought that it would come to that point. And that gets back to what I originally said is we have a real problem in our society that we’re not facing.

Miller: Andrea, the Salem-Keizer District had already been considering installing metal detectors. My understanding is this recent shooting sped up that timeline, the deliberation timeline. How do you think about this issue? I mean, one way I guess that comes to mind is if safety were your only concern, were the district’s only concern, you could turn a school into a prison-like space. But the whole point there is to educate kids safely. How do you think about that balance?

Castañeda: I think about it in two ways. And ironically, they sit in a little bit of tension with one another. First, I think about it as a parent and what I wanted when my kids were in public school and what I believe the average parent wants, which is a joyful, energetic, possibility-filled learning environment. And that means the building and the culture. And I think about it as a superintendent. The way these two things sit in tension with one another is that as a superintendent, I am not willing to take risks with children, especially other people’s children. The responsibility, the moral responsibility for knowing that we have done everything that’s reasonable while still preserving what schools can and should be, is exactly as Mark described.

You would not believe the things that are part of our job now. You would not believe the kinds of threats that we look at. You would not believe the troll threats that we have to review on a weekly basis that come from international locations. The social media activity that’s now part of our team’s daily work. And every day, the question is, are we doing everything that is reasonable to keep the children in our community safe while still protecting what schools can and should be?

Weapon detection is a very controversial topic right now. And if we move forward with it in an expansive way, we will be the first district in Oregon to do it and I do not consider that to be something you want to be first in line for.

Miller: Hmm.

Castañeda: But at this moment, I will have to say we go through weapon detection to do so many things in our lives, to go to the airport, to go to a concert. We do it to go to the hospital, to go to the courthouse. The idea that schools are somehow impervious from the insidious presence of weapons and specifically, guns in our community, is bordering on naive. And as leaders, we have to be practical in addition to being inspired.

Miller: We asked our listeners their thoughts about this and we got a couple of voicemails from a couple of different teachers. I want to play as much as we have time to get to. Let’s first listen to a call that came in from Dave, who said he’s a teacher in Hood River.

Voicemail: I’m more worried about the threat of guns in the household paired with the problems that students have with mental health than I am with gun violence in our school. I think gun violence in our school is a big scary thing, but the one that’s really harming us is students who have mental health issues and they have access to guns.

Miller: Mark, first. So Dave here is talking about two things: one, access to guns. Which as both of you were saying, it’s an example of the limits of school power. He also talked though about the intersection between that and mental health, where theoretically, schools have a little bit more ability to help students or help families. What role do you think mental health plays in this conversation?

Mulvihill: It’s obviously significant. It is the underlying issue but at times, we use mental health… and we say these are mental health things. We need to intervene. But then we never ever addressed the issue of actual guns and access to guns. And that was a little bit of what I heard in the question is there’s an access issue there as well. There’s no secret.

We talk about mental health a lot. It is the homeless issue. It’s a lot of the fundamental problems we’re seeing in our society. And of course, those are coming into the schools. We have invested heavily in mental health in counseling and mental health providers and collaborating with our public health. It is paramount that we provide assistance, but it isn’t just mental health for our kids. It’s mental health for our staff, too. We have really seen after the pandemic, in particular, a change and we often talk about it with our leadership team here. We really don’t know what’s permanent and what’s temporary after the pandemic, but we’re starting to realize a little of these things and the mental health crisis is something where people are evaluating their lives, they’re evaluating their happiness.

There was a real sense of isolation and Oregon was a state that had a pretty long lockdown for schools. We didn’t go to schools compared to some other states. And I’m not here to debate that we certainly took a take on saving lives and we were very proactive in that way. But regardless, our kids were out of school for quite a while. And if we think there isn’t going to be an impact on that mental health and sense of belonging, we’re kidding ourselves. And so schools, again, that’s another area besides actual physical safety that we were describing. The whole culture you’re creating and connection, and a real focus for us all in the school business, is adults connecting with kids and listening and being there for them. But we also need a healthy staff to be able to do that so we’re kind of looking at this on both ends.

I don’t know, Andrea, if you have anything to add along those lines.

Castañeda: On Tuesday, we’ll present the Salem-Keizer Public Schools’ budget, which is a pretty devastating document for financial reasons. But I will say this – we’ll be making almost $50 million of investments in mental health services, the most we’ve ever made. And it’s not enough. What’s happening now across the entire state and nation is school systems are facing very difficult tradeoffs and many of us are choosing mental health services over core academics, not because we think that one matters more than the other, but because we believe that they are progressively linked. And any aspirations we have about academic success are predicated on a basic amount of mental and behavioral health and the stability of our classrooms.

So I agree with Mark and we’ll just say that it is, more than ever, a precondition, an environmental condition for learning and therefore, a necessary service from school systems.

Miller: Andrea, I want to play one more voicemail.

Mulvihill: Dave…

Miller: Yeah, Mark quickly.

Mulvihill: Yes, I was just going to add, too, as I listen to their investment prioritization, another real problem is our workforce. Even though we have financial resources available for mental health and collaboration with others, our CCOs, our public health entities, if finding a quality workforce in this area has become very problematic, especially in the rural areas, finding trained mental health specialists has been very, very difficult in this era as well.

Miller: I want to play one more voicemail quickly. This is Charles, an English teacher from Woodburn.

Voicemail: I know there’s an ongoing narrative that wants to pitch schools as out of control and that learning is not happening, and it’s just not my experience in any way, shape or form. I’m seeing kids thrive. I’m seeing kids do amazing things on a daily basis. And I think part of that is creating a space and place where they get to be their full authentic selves without apology.

Miller: Andrea, I just wanted to give you one last chance to respond to that, especially the last part, that the reason Charles says students are thriving is that they have more of a chance now to be their authentic selves without apology. It’s a little bit of a twist from what we’ve been talking about in terms of gun violence and school safety, but I was struck by this voicemail and I want to give you a chance to respond to it.

Castañeda: I agree with so much of what Charles said. I’ve been in hundreds of classrooms this year and they are magical places. The concept that schools are out of control is a figment of media sensationalization and not a reflection of what’s going on in our buildings or buildings across this state every day. And relative to students being able to be joyful and authentic selves, that is very true. And that means that sometimes they come in and what they bring in with them is difficult. It’s hard, it’s traumatic and they need spaces to be able to recover and recover in ways that are sustaining, not isolating.

I do want to add one quick element to this. A lot of times when people think about gun violence in schools, they think about mass shootings because it’s what captures the media attention. I cannot speak for other superintendents, but in general, that is not what I think about. I think about one student who may make one bad choice in a day to bring a gun into school and find him or herself in an incident. And they decide to use that gun in the hallway. That’s what keeps me up at night because that is a very different kind of incident. It is very difficult to detect and it is very difficult to prevent. Those are the things that require a rich network of preventative mental health safety and those are the things that we’re really focused on. And I can see Mark nodding, too. I think there’s a resonance here in many other school systems.

Miller: Andrea and Mark, thank you very much for your time today.

Mulvihill: Thank you, Dave.

Castañeda:It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Miller: Andrea Castañeda is the superintendent of the Salem-Keizer School District. Mark Mulvihill is superintendent of the InterMountain Education Service District.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.