About half a million metro Atlanta students headed to school Monday, as usual, as parents and school officials tried to make the first school day after a massacre normal.
On Friday a gunman killed 20 students and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school. School-safety fears swept the country, and metro parents flooded districts with questions about security. School administrators responded with emails and messages about procedures to protect their children. And officials and parents alike wrestled with a more pressing concern: what to tell and how to tell the children about the killings.
On Monday they stepped up security — and the appearance of it. Law enforcement agencies in Dekalb, Gwinnett, Cobb, Clayton and Cherokee said they would increase patrols around schools this week.
Fulton County school superintendent Robert Avossa said Monday morning the barrage of calls had mostly subsided, but the fear hadn’t. One parent called him and said she didn’t plan to take her child to school because she worried for her safety.
“I told her that was a highly personal decision,” he said. “But as a parent, I was sending my two children to school.”
Districts sent memos to principals and teachers over the weekend advising them not to discuss the incident unless students asked. And in those moments, they suggested, teachers should speak to students one-on-one.
Kemberly Edwards-Morris, whose 7-year-old son attends Sarah Smith Elementary in Buckhead, said she spoke with him over the weekend about Friday’s events. She applauded Sarah Smith’s handling of the tragedy, noting the school sent a few emails to parents over the weekend about how it planned to manage those conversations with children.
In the emails, the interim principal said the topic would not be directly addressed with students in older grades, but gave tips for how to talk to students if they asked about it, Edwards-Morris said. Teachers in lower grades were instructed to pull younger students with questions aside to address their concerns privately.
“I think those suggestions are the best way to handle discussions about the tragedy,” Edwards-Morris said via email, adding she believes it is parents’ responsibility — not the school’s — to explain the events to children.
To that end, administrators at the Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School in Atlanta sent an email to parents giving advice on how to talk to their young children about Sandy Hook, the school where the children died. And by Monday, teachers and staff at Holy Innocents’ were given guidance on handling the discussion.
Much of it, headmaster Gene Bratek said, depends on the age of the child. Teachers were advised to send children ages 3 through fifth grade to guidance counselors prepared to help them sort out their emotions.
“We suggested to teachers that this isn’t a topic to necessarily bring up in class,” Bratek said. “But if kids do ask questions, give them brief and to-the-point answers.”
Bratek said teachers reported that very few children brought up the tragedy in class Monday. And he received just two emails from parents since Friday inquiring about the school’s security procedures.
While the school hasn’t implemented any dramatic security changes stemming from the violence, Bratek said he planned to meet with other school administrators Monday to review their policies. Holy Innocents’, a private school, has long employed an off-duty police officer to patrol the campus.
The school also has roughly three lockdown drills per year, he said, and had planned one this week. But that drill has been temporarily placed on hold, for fear it could traumatize students.
“I think all of our confidences have been shaken from Friday’s events, and that’s why we’re not sitting back and saying we’ve got this taken care of,” Bratek said.
Metro school districts said they have improved school security considerably over the past decade, since the Columbine school massacre in Colorado and an attack on students at Heritage High School in Rockdale County where six students were shot, none fatally,by a fellow student.
DeKalb schools spokeswoman Lillian M. Govus said the district installed 32 security cameras in 1999 in every one of the schools. Most metro school districts don’t have armed school resource officers in elementary schools. Avossa said that may or may not make a difference.
“What happens if you have a resource officer at the front of the schools and somebody kicks down the back door and kills 20 before the officer can get there?” he said.
There’s also a matter of cost.
Cobb spokesman Jay Dillon said adding resource officers at elementary schools would cost about $3.6 million. “And we’ve got a tight budget,” he said.
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