Violence underscores need for more counselors

San Diego County high school teacher Doug Coffin sounds like a lot of California's educators when he talks about the need for smaller class sizes, more counselors, and less pressure on today's stressed students.

The difference is the urgency in his voice. He witnessed the shooting on March 5 at Santana High School in Santee and speaks from the heart about the need for society to find a way to better connect with children.

State Council delegates fill giant scrolls with messages of support for teachers and students in two San Diego County schools recovering from episodes of gun violence.

The 15-year-old Santana student charged in the fatal shooting reportedly told several students about his rampage plans, but nobody alerted authorities.

"Why didn't they report it?" Coffin asks. "Did they not have people they can trust?"

Teachers must reach out to students, he says, to help ease the isolation they can feel. "You have to get them to connect. Sometimes you have to really care about the kids. You can't just be up there teaching curriculum all the time."

Soon after Coffin shared his thoughts about Santee's shooting, shots rang out at nearby Granite Hills High School. Both campus faculties are represented by the same CTA chapter, the Grossmont Education Association, which toiled to offer support for its shocked members.

Two students were killed at Santana, and Coffin had one of them, Randy Gordon, in his economics class this year. At Granite Hills, teachers Fran Zumwalt and Priscilla Murphy were among five people terrorized but only slightly injured by shotgun fire from an 18-year-old student reportedly upset that he wasn't going to be graduating.

The violence reverberated throughout CTA.

CTA President Wayne Johnson cited the crisis response work done by Grossmont Education Association President Steve Haiman and other specially trained CTA leaders and staff in a March 23 letter to teachers at both Santana and Granite Hills high schools.

"In the span of 17 days, your education community has been struck twice by the kind of shattering campus violence that most schools in America never witness - and never will," Johnson wrote. "On behalf of the 300,000 members of the California Teachers Association, I want to offer you the hope of knowing you are not alone in your shock and grief."

The delegates who attended the quarterly CTA State Council of Education meeting in Burlingame March 24-25 responded as well. Hundreds wrote down heartfelt words of hope and condolences on two cloth scrolls, one each for Santana and Granite Hills, that were then delivered to the San Diego area teachers. They also donated more than $1,400 to a counseling fund for students and teachers.

In a voice cracking with emotion, Earlene Dunbar, a San Diego school counselor who serves as chair of CTA's Student Support Services Committee, spoke of the urgent need to add more counselors to campuses across the state. The new violence shows again that schools must do a better job at detecting "the emptiness, the pain and the lack of hope" that many students feel, she told fellow delegates. "I am sorry that this has to be a wake-up call."

Council's 700 delegates unanimously approved two actions related to the violence:

• They directed CTA to sponsor legislation to improve student/counselor ratios in all K-12 schools, noting in a resolution that CTA/NEA policy "agrees with the American School Counselor Association recommendation that realistic ratios should be 250-1. Currently, California ranks 50th in the nation in regards to student/counselor ratios." Santana had only two counselors for 1,900 students.
• They also directed CTA President Johnson to seek NEA's support for an immediate federal funding increase for more school site counselors "to deal with student violence and to assist students to find peaceful avenues to work through their problems."

CTA chapters should place an emphasis on school safety during negotiations for 2001-02, recommended Council's School Safety/ School Management Committee.

Both high schools had prepared well for a crisis, yet the bloodshed came. What can schools do to spot potentially homicidal students?

Efforts to help depressed students may hold the key. A study released in October by the Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center examined 37 school-shooting incidents and the students involved. Prior to committing the violence, three-quarters of the students had either threatened to kill themselves, made a suicidal gesture, or had tried to kill themselves, according to news reports about the study. More than two-thirds felt persecuted or bullied, and more than half planned their attacks days in advance.

More than 75 percent of the students told someone about their violent intentions in advance, yet the information rarely was brought to the attention of an adult.

Doug Coffin has taught for 20 years at Santana, which is the high school from which he graduated.

He sees hopeful signs in today's students. He recalls with a laugh that, the day after the shooting at his school, two television stations handed over video cameras to students to get them to shoot footage on a day of mourning when no media were allowed on campus.

The students promptly turned the cameras over to the principal. "There's not enough I can say about how strong our kids were," Coffin says.

But he has also seen the erosion of a safety net for students who once felt more connected to each other, who felt they could turn to a teacher or a coach in times of emotional upheaval. And he questions whether new education edicts from the state Legislature are too much for students.

"They want a final product from teachers. It's kind of like you're making something in a factory. We're not making widgets, man, these are people!"

Coffin was among the first to report to Santana administrators that the shooting had begun.

And, in many ways, his words are still sounding the alarm.