No safety net for small communities

It was another of those days that schoolteachers across the United States have come to dread.
The national and regional media were leading with tales of a plot by Riverton High School students to commmit a massacre to commemorate Adolf Hitler's birthday and the seventh anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.
Society is full of disturbed people. Columbine proved those people could be situated among the affluent. The Riverton arrests showed that it can just as easily happen in a rural setting. In other words, no one can feel really comfortable.
Of course, statistics show that violence in schools across the United States is on the downswing. They were even down in 1999 when the Columbine shootings took place. Statistics, though, are not designed to make people feel safe and protected.
As the beginning of the school day nears, I wonder if the Riverton murder plan will be on the minds of my students. Many of them take great pains to avoid anything that smacks of news. At the same time, however, the students always seem to know when something like this happens.
My teaching career began a few short months after Columbine. I remember the subject was on the minds of the Diamond Middle School students that year when school started even though Columbine had occurred more than four months earlier. During those times, it seemed there was some school shooting incident or some rumor of one every other night on the news, although that simply could be the fact that every aspect of Columbine was covered for months.
The odds of something of that nature taking place at any Southwest Missouri school are remote, but then, the same thing could have been said about Riverton before yesterday. It's not something you can dwell on, but unfortunately, in this day and age, every school has to be prepared for the mayhem that can be caused by these twisted souls who somehow have slipped through society's cracks.
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As usual, the media blanketed the Riverton situation, with the local television stations all doing a solid job, and none leaving the others behind.
The most worrisome part of the coverage, especially to those with children at school, or for those of us who work in a school system, was the news that many students stayed at home, having heard that something horrible might be taking place, but apparently they didn't contact the authorities.
The police were led to the murderous plot by a woman in North Carolina who communicated with one of the suspects through MySpace.com That students would be so willing to save themselves and not take a simple step that could have saved dozens, maybe hundreds of lives, may be the scariest information to come out of this situation.