What If?

A group of Ed School educators write about what it means to work in schools when violence is a possibility.

If you work in a school, it’s a question you have to ask yourself: What if? What if a student pulls a gun in class? What if another threatens to burn down the building? What if you’re caught in the crossfire?

In the United States, violence in schools is still rare. School-related homicides make up less than 1 percent of the total number of child and youth homicides each year. But every day across the country, teachers, principals, counselors, and other school workers walk into colleges, high schools, and even elementary schools, knowing that violence is a possibility. Sometimes the school is located in a neighborhood that has been swallowed up by gangs and guns, a constant headline on the nightly news. Other schools are located in suburban and affluent towns where the grass is thought to be greener.

We decided to get educators from the Harvard Graduate School of Education community to share their experiences around this very serious health issue. It wasn’t easy. As one Ed School professor said when asked to suggest alumni for the piece, “Honestly I can’t think of a harder topic to get people to talk about.”

On the following pages, you’ll find three people who were willing to share their stories: William Hayes, a current master’s student working with at-risk boys in Boston; Agustin Vecino, Ed.M.’03, a former teacher at an alternative school in New York City; and Josephine Kim, a lecturer at the Ed School who counseled students and staff at Virginia Tech after last year’s shooting. Their stories are not representative of all educators’ experiences, but we hope they offer a small sampling of what some face every day.

Prevention and Paying Attention

by William Hayes

William Hayes is a current student in the Risk and Prevention Program. Last fall he started interning at a high school in Boston as a prevention specialist. One of his jobs was working with a small group of students who had failed one or more core academic classes in their freshman year. After graduation he hopes to teach high school English or history.

Listen closely. The crashing of classroom doors, slamming of lockers, and swelling of voices are a clear indication that classes are changing. Look around. The clock on the wall reads 1:10 p.m. as students prepare for their last class of the day. Teachers stand on guard at the doorway of each classroom welcoming students and encouraging the slow movers to pick up the pace. Like the drip of a leaky faucet, the kids trickle in slowly, first one, then continuous clusters of twos and threes. Zoom in on me, a Harvard intern, swimming in a sea of confusion with lesson in hand and the undying hope that this time will be different. This time they’ll pay attention, become actively involved, and decide that this lesson is worth learning. This time they’ll engage in discussion and work harder than they ever have before. This time they will care what I have to say. Welcome to my world.

Now look closer. Notice the button on the coat of the boy in the corner. Look at the pin on the girl’s book bag to your right. Those are pictures of their deceased friends or family members. See if you can count the number of names on the front of his notebook, the one with R.I.P. at the top. Listen closely for the conversation about a fight that might happen after school. Notice the two boys outside the door displaying gang signs through the glass. Zoom in on him, a high school student, swimming in a sea of confusion with a lesson in hand and the undying hope that this time will be different. This time he won’t have to fear the long walk home, dodge the men on the corner, and race against the sun. This time he won’t have to hear gunshot lullabies in the night, listen to his mother’s screams from inside his home, or endure the continual nightmares. This time someone will care. Welcome to his world.

Words such as at-risk and troubled are often tossed around like a terminal diagnosis for a chronic and incurable disease. The truth of the matter is that these youth are at risk of a lot more than the dropout research would suggest. They are at risk of meeting death before they ever meet a teacher who cares enough to understand. These students are at risk of making a mistake and never having a chance to do it differently. Every day they risk becoming another face on a button or name on a notebook. Even worse, they risk having the real picture go unnoticed by teachers who only recognize the world they expect to see.

As a prevention intern at a small pilot high school, my job includes much more than developing success plans and offering emotional support. Students are looking for something or someone to believe in. They put up walls not only to protect from hurt and harm, but to see who cares enough to rescue them from their self-constructed prisons. As I listen to their stories, I find myself at the brink of a new reality and I choose to be the one at risk in their world, where I am a novice and they are the experts. I risk facing the familiar hopelessness that informs their thoughts, actions, and choices. No one narrative could ever convey the magnitude of this mental and emotional baggage that students carry from one class to the next.

Choosing to adopt a philosophy of trust and care has taken me on a journey above and beyond the call of duty into an area far outside of my comfort zone. Yet it was in this place that I found true success. In this new place I stood at the front of the class with the undying hope that this time would be different. That this time I would pay attention, become actively involved, and decide that this was a lesson worth teaching. This time I would engage in discussion and work harder than I ever have before. This time I would care what they actually had to say.

Small School Advantage

By Agustin Vecino, Ed.M.'03

Agustin Vencino worked for four years at a progressive high school in New York City, which he says he loved. Vecino is now working as a social studies literacy coach at a middle school in Los Angeles, where he grew up amid gang violence. He believes that small, personalized schools are one way to effectively address challenging issues like violence.

When I was first asked how school violence has affected my experience as a public school educator, I really didn’t know how to answer the question. In the communities that I have worked in as a teacher, violence has always been a sad characteristic that my students have had to deal with. It was like that when I was in my teens and it has unfortunately remained that way. Whatever the baggage is, students bring it to school. It has been up to the adults to determine how to harness that baggage, whether working with young people from South Central Los Angeles or upper Manhattan.

I recently worked for four years at a small, alternative public high school in midtown Manhattan. Having already spent several years teaching in my native Los Angeles, I was drawn to New York’s small school movement for several characteristics: personalization, authentic assessment (in the form of portfolios and exhibitions), and an advisory system. These traits focused on areas that I thought were failing my Los Angeles students: impersonal learning environments, high-stakes testing, and community building. I needed to see that public schools could indeed handle the complex issues that young people — especially low-income, black, and Latino — face day in and day out. Given the same demographics, I wanted to be a part of a school that was an “alternative” to the larger, more traditional schools out there. Despite the location, most of our students commuted from several neighborhoods in upper Manhattan — Inwood, Washington Heights, and Harlem. Historically speaking, these communities have had to deal with complex issues, including violence.

Last year was unusual for us. We typically have much lower incidences of violence in comparison to our larger counterparts. Like all humans, we have our differences and sometimes, there are conflicts. However, since it is a small school, students and teachers know each other well. Conflicts are usually addressed between students and advisors. Last year, we had several fights that pitted neighborhoods against each other. (A couple were significant enough that police responded when they spilled onto the streets.) We had a former student involved in a serious, off-campus altercation. In another incident, several students from our sister school were assaulted with a weapon and one was injured; some of our students directly knew the victim.

While all this was happening, not once did I hear teachers worry about their own safety. Nor did I hear adults in our school talk about bringing metal detectors on campus to make them feel safer. I can honestly say that our personalized environment added to teachers’ commitment to students. We knew our students too well to put the blame entirely on them.

Once we realized that these incidents were looking like a pattern, our response was to fall back on one of our strengths: the small, personable nature of our school. Emergency advisory meetings were held instead of content classes. Students were given a chance to voice their thoughts on the school community, their peers, and the violent incidents. Some were scared, some were close to those involved, and others were indifferent. But students also realized how this was affecting our school’s climate and how they could influence the tone inside the school despite what was going on outside.

That year was especially difficult, but we got through it. It wasn’t a fast process, but it helped to take advantage of our resources as a small school in order to strengthen our idea of what “community” meant. If we were a large school at which teachers and students barely knew each other, I can only imagine how difficult it would have been to try to resolve those issues. I don’t think we, as staff, ever thought of ourselves as invincible to the issues affecting our students’ communities. But I think all of us — students, teachers, and administrators — realized that we did have influence over our school community.

A Shooting and Secondary Victims

By Josephine Kim

Lecturer Josephine Kim is a licensed mental health counselor who spent about two weeks counseling and educating Korean Americans in Virginia following the shooting spree at Virginia Tech in 2007 by a Korean American student that left 32 dead and another 25 wounded. She also went into neighboring communities heavily populated by Korean Americans to offer counseling.

Existential crisis can be described as a state of panic or intense psychological discomfort regarding one’s existence and is often triggered by a significant event or change in one’s life that makes one reflect on his or her own mortality. Typical examples of such events are the death of a loved one or a life-threatening experience. Ten months after the deadly shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, I am still amid the existential crisis that began the morning of April 16, 2007.

I know of eight additional school shootings that have occurred in the United States since the aforementioned episode, and each time reports blare through the media, my chord of existential crisis becomes struck again. Although I never witnessed these incidents of terror firsthand, there are symptoms of compassion fatigue that plague my daily existence related to the secondary trauma I experienced in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings.

Secondary trauma, or vicarious trauma, occurs when you see or hear about a traumatic event repeatedly, and even if the trauma did not happen to you directly, you are left with its effects. People in the human services field experience it. Symptoms range from anger, anxiety, and depression to emotional exhaustion. My work on Virginia Tech’s campus after the massacre was short-lived, but even now, I have difficulty concentrating or remembering things. I also experience irregular sleep patterns and suffer from unexplained headaches. I find myself unconsciously withdrawing from others; it is an emotional residue from the exposure of working with people who are suffering from the consequences of traumatic events, namely school violence. I guess it is the cost of caring about people. I have become reclusive, in the same way I did after returning from working with Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans during the summer of 2006. I know this is a symptom of compassion fatigue.

Compassion fatigue is dissimilar to burnout. While burnout is often resolved by taking a vacation, compassion fatigue is a state of tension and preoccupation with the cumulative trauma of clients or students. It is often manifested in re-experiencing the traumatic event or in a persistent hyperarousal and fear that it could happen to you. It is often accompanied by nightmares, hypervigilance, avoidance, and/or a preoccupation with the trauma. Again, it is the stress of caring too much, and in my life, it has manifested itself in nightmares and a preoccupation with finding out every detail I can about the killer, somehow believing that having an explanation to the madness will relieve the trauma.

As a faculty member, there is a perpetual fear that shootings could happen on this campus. I find myself unconsciously preparing for it — mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically, and even morally — and I have yet to answer my own question: If a shooting occurred in my classroom, could I, as the brave faculty members of Virginia Tech did, place myself in between the perpetrator and my students to protect the bright, young minds of the future instead of saving myself? This dreaded question is followed by a heightened sense of responsibility pertaining to gatekeeping of students, with an internalized pressure to admit not only the brightest, but the healthiest students who could somehow guarantee the safety of students, faculty, and ultimately me.

I pay deep homage to the faculty and those in the helping professions on the campuses of Virginia Tech, Delaware State University, Mount Vernon Elementary School, Success Tech Academy, Louisiana State University, Louisiana Technical College, E.O. Green High School, Notre Dame Elementary School, and Northern Illinois University. Dissimilar to me, they have to live through not only the secondary trauma of helping their students cope and deal with school violence, but they face the effects of direct, primary trauma as victims themselves. My thoughts and prayers are with you.

Dedicated to Nancy Bodenhorn, Mido Chang, and Gerard Lawson of the Counselor Education Program at Virginia Tech. You are the heroes of today, and your work matters.

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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