“These kids are begging us to stop them,” said Amy Klinger, a co-founder of the Educator’s School Safety Network, who consults on school safety from the perspective of the former teacher and principal that she is. “We just have to be better at picking up the warning signs.”
The schools alone cannot do it. Arguably, Dr. Klinger said, the failure to identify Mr. Cruz as troubled was a failure of the entire community, along with law enforcement agencies that had been warned about him.
“A school can identify the individual of concern, but they didn’t create that individual,” Dr. Klinger said. “So yeah, there is a role that the community and parents and our society has to play in identifying and dealing with those individuals as well.”
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“After Sandy Hook, a lot of schools got very panicky and bought $5,000 buzzer systems,” Dr. Klinger said. “They bought the system that was breached by the intruder in the first 30 seconds of Sandy Hook. He shot out the door and walked into the school. So your buzzer system did absolutely no good.”
