Posted: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 12:00 am
Star-Tribune Editorial Board
Though 20 years have passed since a bomb exploded at western Wyoming's Cokeville Elementary School, that traumatic event still offers lessons about school safety.
Wayne Beatty, coordinator of the Safe Schools program for the Natrona County School District, recalls that before Cokeville, strangers were always thought to represent the biggest danger to students. But it was a former town marshal and his wife - well-known to school staff members - who held 150 students and teachers hostage in a classroom on May 16, 1986.
Both kidnappers died after their bomb accidentally went off. The woman, Doris Young, was badly injured by the explosion. Her husband, David, shot her to death and then turned the gun on himself.
One of the first in a series of school deaths that captured national attention, the Cokeville story shattered some previous beliefs.
"Parents were absolutely convinced it was their right to come into a classroom, any time of day," Beatty says. "It took a number of school tragedies to reverse that thinking."
Now, he adds, parents not only report first to the office during a visit, they often notify school officials if they find an entrance left unlocked.
Beatty credits the Cokeville bombing and the fatal shootings of five students at a Stockton, Calif., school playground in 1989 with sparking interest in school crisis management and threat assessment.
The biggest change has been the awareness that school violence can happen anywhere, including Wyoming, and is not just confined to big cities.
Casper officials, like their counterparts everywhere, had to decide how to deal with potential problems. To their credit, officials here didn't immediately install metal detectors or closed-circuit TVs, or put police officers in the hallways. Instead, they hired more counselors and worked to develop better relationships to prevent bullying and other behavior that has led to school violence.
"We can definitely do some things to make people safer," Beatty notes. "But we don't want them to feel like they're in a prison."
A few years ago, the district decided against issuing student identification cards, concluding that such a system would be needlessly cumbersome.
As crisis management, mitigation and prevention have evolved in the days since Cokeville and Columbine, officials have learned there is no way they can guarantee safety at school. Yet teachers, parents and the students themselves need to continue looking for ways to foster a safe environment.
In 1986, Cokeville's lesson was that school violence can happen anywhere. Though safety measures have improved in the past two decades, the lesson remains true today.