Since 9:21 a.m. this past Friday, Morgantown High School has been operating under a siege of angst.
Thank a deadly shooting in Michigan – and two bits of bathroom graffiti that city police later discounted – for that.
It started at that time when a message in pencil was discovered scrawled on the wall of boys bathroom on the third floor: “I’m shoot [sic] up on the school on Dec. 3, Friday.”
School administration and the MHS student resource officer, an on-duty Morgantown police officer, were immediately notified, given the events the week before at Oxford High School in Oakland County, Mich.
Some 20 minutes later, at 9:48 a.m., another note, again in pencil and declaring the same intent only for “Dec. 6, Monday,” was discovered in another boys bathroom in the science wing of the sprawling school on Wilson Avenue.
Morgantown PD patrol cars were also dispatched to Wilson, to cruise the campus and the surrounding South Park neighborhood.
All the while, Oxford student Ethan Crumbley, 15, has been charged as an adult in the aftermath at his school near Detroit.
He is alleged to have opened fire with a semiautomatic handgun, killing four fellow students, besides wounding six others, plus a teacher.
Now, his parents are facing criminal charges as well – and prosecutors aren’t necessarily ruling out additional charges at the OHS administration, saying neither party did enough to tend to a teenager in emotional trouble who had planned the assault all along.
Taking it seriously
At MHS meanwhile, a number of unsettled parents kept their children out of class Monday and Tuesday, even though Monongalia Schools Superintendent Eddie Campbell Jr. placed the school under a “modified learning environment” – meaning passage in hallways during class changes will be even more regimented than it already is with COVID protocols.
That measure will remain in place “indefinitely,” he said, during Tuesday night’s Board of Education meeting and will carry over to the county’s middle schools as well.
Adding to those parentally frazzled nerves, though, came another rumor: A purported cell-snap of a handgun, in an MHS student’s backpack this time.
From that morning on at MHS, social media was buzzing with accounts.
Speaking at the Mon BOE meeting, Brandie Miles and another parent worried about the climate where school violence is now so commonplace, they said – that aggression, or a threat, might simply be downplayed as a prank or acting out.
They also wondered about the possibility of placing metal detectors in buildings or enacting a clear-backpack policy.
“Kids should not fear for their lives attending classes,” Miles said, “and we shouldn’t fear sending our kids to school.”
Thus, the quandary
Campbell said while the above threats were deemed not credible by police, the district will continue its strict monitoring while enforcing preventive measures, including counseling and class-discussion prompts that have long been in place in Mon’s school buildings.
That includes active shooter drills – though there haven’t been any recently and for months before, all due to the pandemic, Deputy Superintendent Donna Talerico said.
And all of Mon’s school buildings, BOE member Ron Lytle said, have been constructed with, or retrofitted with, multi-checkpoint entrances and exits in accordance with the Safe Schools Act.
“You can’t just walk into Morgantown High like you used to,” he said.
Lytle, a parent with children in Mon schools, said communicating safety measures is a dance he’d rather not have on his card.
Don’t get him wrong, he said: While transparency is one thing, making it easier for someone with a weapon and bad intent couldn’t be more opposite.
“It’s a Catch-22,” he said. “You can’t show your playbook before the game.”
The staff and administration with access that playbook, he said, have profound concern and care for the children who trek down those hallways and scoot behind those desks daily.
“More than you can dream,” he said.
If walking in to MHS, or any other Mon school, isn’t as easy as it used to be, Lytle mused, then running is more difficult than ever.
Thank Facebook, Instagram, text messaging and the like for that, he said.
“How do you run ahead of social media?” he asked.
“How do you put parents at ease when they believe everything they see on social media?”
TWEET @DominionPostWV
