Comments from Matt Davis, president of the ºüÀêÊÓƵ Public Schools board of education, October 25, 2002.
"Today we begin to try to make sense of this, to try to heal, to try to learn and see how we can stop this from ever happening again.
One of the hardest things is that people keep saying that the district did everything right, the police did everything right, that there really wasn't anything more that we could do, that the training went off as planned. The students followed how they were trained. Staff followed how they were trained. Our security officers acted with unflinching courage. The police responded immediately.
And yet we're still left with tragedy.
It's already become political, both sides of an issue trying to score points. What I think that we ask is, let's find a solution.
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This was the 40th school shooting this year. It was a record number. The last record was set last year. This is a trend that must stop.
What else can we do? We arm our security guards. We locked the doors. We train kids starting in preschool what to do when someone comes into their school and tries to inflict trauma on them, to hurt them.
A safe place, a sacred place for our childhood and it's been taken away from our kids in this city.
We have got to do better.
Every night and every day, we all know when we live in this city we hear gunshots ring out. We lose kids every day on the streets.
I've said it 100 times, Dr. Adams over his tenure has been one of the only people who've been speaking out about this and no one seems to listen, no one seems to care enough to do anything.
But we took some solace in the fact that at least for the time that the kids were with us, they were safe, they were in the safest place they could possibly be, and yesterday that didn't happen. And I'm sorry, I'm angry. I'm angry for these teachers that have to go and put up with so much outside nonsense when they're just driven to teach these kids, to care for these kids, to help and give them a better life.
And now they have to be social workers, they have to be doctors, they have to find some time to care for themselves. And yet, we send them back today, we'll send them back tomorrow, we'll continue to ask more and more and more of our teachers and our staff.
It's gotta change. I hope, I beg, that we learn a lesson. That we do something to help people suffering from mental illness, our kids that are so tragically hurt that they are driven to just these senseless acts ... and that we find a way to get these weapons of war off of our streets, and for the love of God, out of our schools."