Policies and procedures that could have prevented a mass shooting that left four students dead at a Michigan high school last year were previously passed but never implemented, two former school board officials said Monday.
Tom Donnelly and Korey Bailey, who recently stepped down as president and board treasurer of Oxford Community Schools, told reporters that the district had adopted a threat assessment policy in 2004 and has since updated it.
Bailey said she first learned of the policy in August. He calls it “an operational guide to preventing school violence” that defines the roles of teachers, counselors and other staff when there are signs of a possible threat. He also said that it was never put into practice in Oxford school buildings before November 30, 2021.
OXFORD HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS WHO MARKED ‘WORRIING’ SHOOTER WARNING SIGNS WERE IGNORED: LAWYER
Wednesday will mark the one-year anniversary of the Oxford High School shooting that also injured six other students and a teacher.
Prosecutors have said Ethan Crumbley used a semiautomatic pistol to open fire on other teens in the hallway of the school about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Detroit. The four students killed were Tate Myre, 16, Hana St. Juliana, 14, Madisyn Baldwin, 17, and Justin Shilling, 17.
School officials have been criticized by County Sheriff and Oakland County Attorney Karen McDonald for failing to alert a school resource officer to their concerns with Crumbley and for failing to search the teen’s backpack before allowing him to return to class a few three hours before the shooting.
Former Oxford Community School Board Chairman Tom Donnelly presents a portfolio titled “Improving School Safety Using a Threat Assessment Model, An Operational Guide to Preventing Targeted School Violence” at a news conference on Monday. Donnelly was one of multiple school officials who noted that the guidelines listed in the post were not followed correctly in the lead up to the 2021 Oxford high school shooting.
(Daniel Mears/Detroit News via AP)
The day before the shooting, a teacher saw Crumbley, then 15, looking at ammunition on her phone while in class. School officials left a voicemail informing his mother about it. On the morning of the shooting, Crumbley’s parents were summoned to the school and confronted with drawings of him, which included a gun and the words: “Thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”
Authorities said his parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, refused to take him home after the 13-minute meeting, telling them to find him.
Widely accepted best practices for threat assessment have been adapted from Secret Service guidance developed in the years since the 1999 Columbine school massacre. The agency’s National Center for Threat Assessment recommends that teams be established multidisciplinary teams of school administrators, security, and mental health professionals to assess whether a student would receive help with counseling, be reported to the police, sent back to class, or something in between.
Donnelly compared it to measures districts across the country use to prevent deaths from school fires.
“When you don’t want children to die in a fire, you create processes and procedures … and you’re training them,” he said. “We never did that with this (threat assessment) policy and guidance,” Donnelly said. “We never did it and so when we needed to implement it, it wasn’t there. Someone may have been trained on it, but we never built a team. We never had the team activated. We never practiced the team. We never did drills.” .
The Oxford Community Schools Board of Education said Monday that a third-party review of the events leading up to, during and after the shooting will help to understand the facts.
“We ask the public to allow this important review process to take place so that the facts can come to light in a clear, accurate and unbiased manner,” current board chairman Dan D’Alessandro said in a statement. .
Ethan Crumbley, now 16, pleaded guilty last month to charges of terrorism and first-degree murder. Prosecutors have said they will seek a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
SHOOTING AT OXFORD SCHOOL: ETHAN CRUMBLEY PLEADS GUILTY TO CHARGES
Oakland County Attorney Karen McDonald also charged his parents with manslaughter, accusing them of failing to keep the gun used in the shooting safe at home and failing to provide reasonable care for their son when he showed signs of mental distress. The Crumbleys face trial next year.
Detroit attorney Ven Johnson, who is representing the families of some victims in a civil lawsuit against the district, said some teachers and a school counselor knew of Ethan Crumbley’s troubling interest in guns and violence months before the mass shooting.
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The resignations of Donnelly and Bailey are the latest exoduses from the district. Schools Superintendent Ken Weaver announced that he has a medical license that will lead to his resignation on February 21. Weaver was named superintendent in March after his predecessor, Tim Throne, retired.
