Three U.S. school shootings in the past week, one of which occurred only an hour away, have put Madison schools on edge.
The most recent school shooting occurred Monday at Wolf Rock School, a one room Amish schoolhouse in eastern Pennsylvania. According to local police, a 32-year-old truck driver executed four girls and critically wounded seven others before taking his own life.
All Madison schools are required to have a plan in place to effectively control crisis situations. According to Jefferson Middle School principal John Burmaster, every school has a ""crisis response protocol.""
According to Alan Harris, principal at Madison East High School, the chief goal of the school system is the well being of its students and that includes protecting them from violence.
""At all times our job is to come to school every day, and our first priority is the safety of the kids,"" Harris said.
According to Burmaster, Friday's fatal shooting of a principal in nearby Cazenovia, Wis. has put Jefferson's faculty on edge and school administrators have begun to examine their own safety and the root causes of student rage.
""As a principal, I have never given my own personal safety any thought,"" Burmaster said. ""But after the Weston [high school] thing, you start to think about the proclivity toward violence in our society. You start to wonder what is going on here.""
Both Harris and Burmaster said the most effective preventative measure is establishing positive bonds between students and faculty in school. If the students feel welcomed and accepted, they are less likely to do something drastic, the principals said.
""There has been a lot of discussion, and the best thing we can do as a school community is to work on student relationships and adult-and-student relationships to create a sense of belonging in the school,"" Harris said.
But beyond cultivating a good rapport with their students, Madison school administrators say there is little they can do to prevent shootings. All Madison high schools have unarmed security guards, but high-level prevention plans are lacking.
The Madison Police Department has taken measures to train its officers to handle specific situations in local schools, where they occasionally find deadly weapons hidden away in lockers but have never dealt with in-school gun violence. Still, according to Public Information Officer Mike Hanson, police are prepared for a Madison school shooting.
""Our training has included rapid response, and emergency response teams [trained] in the school setting,"" Hanson said. ""It's something that we're rehearsed on and is hopefully something we don't have to use.""
