The shooting outside an Atlanta high school football game Friday night is the symptom of a larger problem, Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Meria Carstarphen says: A failure to give students hope.
Two people were injured Friday after police say two groups of young men confronted each other outside the Grady - Carver football game. An 18-year old student was was shot in the back and a 52-year-old woman was injured when stray bullets hit her in the ankle and grazed her head.
Carstarphen says Atlanta can change the circumstances that lead to Friday's shooting—and a similar shooting last year during the Mays-Carver football game—but it will take concerted action by people and institutions throughout the city.
In the short term, she says that will include changes like a more visible police presence at events and a “fan civility” policy. But longer term, Carstarphen is calling for community conversations to seek specific solutions — and for the resources to teach students and families skills to build better lives and avoid violence.
She spoke with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the issues behind Friday’s shooting.
(Interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Q: Soon after the shooting, you issued a “call to action.” What exactly do you think is wrong that lead to these shootings and what specifically needs to be done to change it?
A: A lot of it is tied to children and their families over time not receiving a high quality education. That’s part of it.
But the other part as it relates to the Friday incident is that there hasn’t been a lot of standard setting and expectations setting around how we work, learn and play together in a way that says this is really about children. This is about the adults in our school community modeling for our children how we’re supposed to act, behave, talk and engage with each other.
There was a time where the home environment was the place where these things were taught. It’s those skills that we have to go back and think about as competencies and standards and how do we actually teach that to children and adults.
A large part of what I’ve been saying and what I’ve been doing in my leadership as a superintendent is having a conversation with the leaders of schools and the teachers in classrooms about the foundational skills of social and emotional learning so that students can indeed persevere when they come up against challenges in life.
Q: Is the problem that kids no longer know how to behave?
What I’m saying is that the challenge is in education and how we behave and model for children as adults.
My burning platform is this: We are not providing in our school community of Atlanta a clear direction for our children so they have choice-filled lives. Without that, anything goes.
Having a choice, having another option, an option that gives you hope, that gives you opportunity—I think that’s what the issue is. They don’t see that because we haven’t built that for them.
And we must do that in this city.
In Atlanta, given where the district’s been, I keep coming back to that notion that the heart of our challenge is that these things will keep happening if they don’t have access to a choice-filled life and we have to build that in every corner of our community.
Q: To fix that, what are you asking people to do? What should the city to do? What should parents do?
You need some very clear steps about how you want to unpack the issue.
I want the school community to do that with us and have a districtwide community conversation about what those issues are and how do we really engage in ways that say “We care about each other and we are going to be respectful of each other.”
I want to talk about our mindset, our behaviors and how we can help our kids and our adults reduce the desire to “fight, flight or freeze” or go from 0 to 100 and the situation is escalated.
It starts with us and then also, to put a finer point on it, we can't do it alone. We need our families to step up and be part of that conversation. We're going to need some support with things like more police presence or how we manage traffic flow.
Q: What resources do you need to solve this problem? Do you have a wish list?
There are some very basic resource pieces around security measures that you would think would be easy but are difficult when you’re inside of a school community.
Things like perimeter security officers during a game night or giving us support around visible police presence. That’s a very basic real thing that isn’t complicated that our partners with the city could help us with immediately.
In the middle is a lot around working with our partners to help us do the programmatic and the teaching piece with the community conversations. It’s the organizing, it’s the communications, it’s the training piece so that people understand what we’re trying to do in school so they can support us outside of school and at home.
The last piece is, once we do that, how do we make sure that we have the tools in place to reinforce and monitor and continue to educate new families as they come in and have people’s support.
Right now we're trying to roll out social-emotional learning with the resource base that we have. [Note: Atlanta schools will spend about $1 million this year on new "social-emotional learning" programs at selected schools to teach students skills like managing emotions, building positive relationships and making responsible decisions.] If we really want to get the lift fast we need more investment so that we can bring on more capacity and train more teachers and staff members faster.
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