Round up for the end of the week

 Some things to read or consider this week:

• Some Aquinnah Wampanoag elders gathered last week to talk about the closing in 1968 of Gay Head School, which served Aquinnah Wampanoag children in Martha's Vineyard.
  
  
• The Boston Globe ran an "epic fail" headline on an article that only followed the experience of two students; no systemwide data on transportation on the first day of school was yet available. This is how the educating reporting earns our cynicism.
  
  
• Useful paper out this week on public comment and public policy found four things: 
  

  First, commenters at public meetings are unrepresentative of the public along racial, gender, age, and homeownership lines; second, distance to the proposed development predicts commenting behavior, but only among those in opposition; third, commission votes are correlated with commenters’ preferences; finally, the alignment of White commenters (vs. other racial groups) and neighborhood group representatives and the general public (vs. other interest groups) better predict project approvals.

• In light of the shootings in Georgia, note that in Oswego County, NY, in response to threats by a 10 year old boy, law enforcement visited the home to remove guns if there were any (there were not), because NY has a law that "allows law enforcement to search a home and remove guns if someone is thought to have access to weapons and be a danger to themselves or others.”
  
  

• And because this always brings up discussion of mental health, a reminder that mental health is more of a predictor of victim than assailant.

• May J.D. Vance's characterization of school shootings as "a fact of life" be the real life "crime, boy, I don't know" *

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*and if you snark about The West Wing references, you are free to read elsewhere.

"Someone tell me what to do": what the kids know and the cops don't

On this day when we mourn yet two more shootings in Texas and in Nevada, and Senate Republicans again blocked an effort to reinstate an assault weapons ban, I would urge you to take time to read "Someone tell me what to do" which is the work of ProPublica, the Texas Tribune, and PBS Frontline on the police response to the Uvalde shootings. As the article opens:

When confronted with a mass shooter, the children and teachers of Uvalde knew what to do.
Many officers did not.

The part that was most heartbreaking to me: because the students were quiet, as they have been trained to be, the officers didn't think that anyone was in the classrooms.

Frontline has also a documentary that they've put together. You can read about the reporting here.

And Worcester takes the lede

...in this Boston Globe editorial, and you're going to wish that we didn't:

A history teacher at Worcester’s Claremont Academy was so traumatized by an active-shooter training exercise for educators that she left the classroom sobbing. The “training” involved a hooded man pointing a gun at teachers’ heads and saying “bang” as he fake-shot them one by one.
“How is this something that is going to help us?” the history teacher asked a Worcester Telegram columnist two years ago when recounting her experience, which was part of the district’s implementation of ALICE, a program designed to train teachers to respond to an active shooter in the school building.

As far as I know, this never came up at Worcester School Committee.

In any case, the editorial opining against such drills is excellent:

So what works for preventing mass school shootings? The short answer is that we don’t have enough independent scientific research to know. But to the extent that drills are valuable to train school staff, teachers, and students, they should be approached with extreme skepticism and care, and without traumatizing students. At a minimum, if schools continue to use them, more study of their effectiveness is needed, which could lead to state guidelines. And, if every other response to school shootings fails, perhaps the nation could finally confront the root cause: the easy availability of deadly weapons that has forced schools into asking the question of how to respond to mass shooters in the first place.