Silver Rail families face fear and trauma as school reopening nears

A little before 1 p.m. on Oct. 15, Malia Parker’s daughter was in music class at Silver Rail Elementary when the 5-year-old needed to go to the bathroom.

The kindergartner was in the restroom by herself, where she couldn’t hear any of the announcements as the school went into lockdown, Parker said. When her daughter tried to go back to the class, the door was locked. The halls were empty.

The girl would later tell her mom she thought maybe her classmates had gone back to their main classroom, so she walked alone down the stairs toward the south entrance of the school.

The route took her near the path a 16-year-old with a shotgun had just taken into a special education classroom, where he killed four people and injured two others.

Parker still doesn’t know exactly what her 5-year-old heard or saw that day. It was only many hours later, back at home, that she learned a police officer found the girl by herself, hiding under a desk in an empty classroom.

Now, Parker said, she’s struggling to imagine sending her daughter back to those hallways.

Returning to school is a decision hundreds of Silver Rail families are facing since Bend-La Pine Schools announced plans to have more than 400 students of the school resume classes on Nov. 12.

In announcing its plans the district cited results from a survey sent to Silver Rail families that indicated over 86% of respondents would like to return to classes. Roughly 85% also said that they would like to see more safety measures taken at the school.

At the first community meeting with Silver Rail families since the school shooting, district officials on Wednesday night reinforced promises to have a school resource officer on campus everyday for the rest of the school year, while tempering expectations about more costly measures like bulletproofing the building.

Trauma experts spoke to families about what to expect in the days, weeks, months and years to come.

Parents questioned how their kids could ever feel safe again, why the teenage shooter targeted a special education program where he was once a student, and if the district could have done more to prevent it.

Since the shooting, Parker’s daughter has asked her “if there’s going to be someone to protect her next time a bad guy comes,” Parker said. “Which makes my heart so broken.”

‘No roadmap’

Parker said her family is leaning toward homeschooling instead of going back, but hasn’t decided. She said she’s keeping an open mind about the changes proposed by the district, but has her doubts.

“I don’t know how they’re going to get funding to get all of the safety upgrades that they would need for everyone to feel safe going back,” Parker said.

Even for parents who’ve decided to return to Silver Rail, the calculation is complicated.

Trey Heiss’ 8-year-old daughter was in a classroom kitty-corner to the one the shooter entered, he said.

“She was as close as she could have been to it without being involved,” Heiss said. Immediately after the shooting his daughter told him she heard what happened in the nearby room, he said. But now, she says she didn’t hear anything.

He thinks his daughter is trying to distance herself from it. The next hard part, he said, will come when he tells her what happened that day.

The shooter killed three boys — 5, 8, and 11 — and a 25-year-old teacher. A 7-year-old girl and another teacher were injured.

The attack ended after an armed father of two girls at the school intervened before law enforcement arrived. Kaylub Giamanco was driving by on the street when he saw a teen with a shotgun walking toward the school. Giamanco witnessed the shooter open fire on another driver who tried to stop him. He saw the shooter jump the school fence and heard him blast through locked glass doors on the school’s south side. Giamanco, who had a handgun in his truck, pursued the shooter into the building. That’s when he heard “children pleading for their lives,” and gunfire, he told OPB in an interview.

Giamanco made it to the special education classroom as the shooter was grappling with a teacher, then he shot and killed the 16-year-old.

Heiss is waiting for the intensity of this tragedy to hit his 8-year-old, who was across the hall.

“Once she realizes that it’s friends and the teacher that she knew and stuff like that, that’s when we’re going to start having issues,” he said.

Heiss started a petition calling for districtwide safety measures like having a school resource officer at every school, not just Silver Rail. Over 3,200 people had signed it as of Wednesday.

Heiss said the district’s promise to have a dedicated student resource officer on site provides “a little bit of a stepping stone” for him “to comfortably” send his daughter back.

To Bend-based clinical psychologist Ashley Niemeyer, “there’s no roadmap for when kids should go back and whether they should go back. Lots of different districts have done lots of different things.”

Niemeyer, who specializes in helping people work through extreme trauma said the “right” approach varies by person, but delaying returning to classes could build more anxiety.

For some students going back to Silver Rail could be a trauma trigger, she said, and in those cases she recommends not forcing it.

“That’s where mental health plays into it,” she said. “And then the parents and families all have to make their own choices, absolutely.”

‘Avoidance makes it worse’

On Wednesday night representatives from the school district, the Bend Police Department and the National Mass Violence Center met with hundreds of Silver Rail parents to answer questions about the return to school.

NMVC has been consulting with the district and works with communities around the country who’ve experienced mass violence. The district told media organizations not to attend this meeting in-person, but did provide a livestream of the room.

“Next week is going to be tough,” said NMVC Co-Director Angie Moreland. “Getting back to school is going to be tough. This is the nightmare that you didn’t want.”

Still, the message Moreland came back to throughout the night was that returning to school is the best practice.

“Avoidance makes it worse,” she said, adding that it’s not time, but steps that have to be met first to make sure the “school is physically ready,” for the teachers to be “trained and ready,” and for the community to get the opportunity to have their questions answered.

Bend-La Pine Schools Superintendent Steve Cook said the focus this week is on getting teachers prepared to meet students next week. But, he said, each educator has to decide for themselves if they’re ready.

“They are all going through their own journey,” Cook said. “It may be that they go back and they do it for a week and then they say that they can’t do it.”

He said there will be a handful of substitute teachers available to the school to step in and be extra support when needed.

Parents at the meeting raised fears about safety protocols. They asked why the lockdown wasn’t done faster since some teachers saw the shooter climb over the school fence with a gun. Others wanted to know why some students were left out of classrooms, like Parker’s daughter.

Scott Bojanowski, the district’s director of safety, said that the lockdown was initiated within a minute of the shooter going over the fence and the first law enforcement officer was “through the door in two minutes and four seconds.”

According to Moreland the lockdown drill used in Deschutes County is the national “gold standard.” But even then, she said, it isn’t fail proof.

“No,” she said. “It happened.”

Bojanowski said that any long-term changes like bulletproof glass or adding more security measures to the building would require time. To change the glass on the exterior windows alone, he said, would cost “north of half a billion dollars.”

District officials said they are pursuing multiple federal and state grants to ensure long-term changes and services.

One mother’s comment got notable applause from the room. A parent asked for transparency about how the district was going to address the fact that special needs children were targeted by a former student in Silver Rail’s special education program.

“I can’t shake the fact that this was targeted towards special needs children,” the parent said. “What is the transparency there in the investigation of this teen’s participation? Where was he failed? What happened there and what is the future for kids who slip through the cracks?”

Cook said the “cold, hard truth” is that Oregon has the lowest funding cap for special education in the country. He, along with other educators, are pushing legislators to “adequately fund our students,” he said.

The last question of the evening was about what will happen to the classroom where the shooting happened.

“We want that space to be repurposed,” Cook said. “We need to make that decision as a community. It won’t be boarded up forever unless you say that’s what you want.”