Eileen Sather, a mom of two, headed to a park over the weekend with her kids in search of normalcy after a shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School that left three students and a teacher dead.
But even as she pushed her daughter on a swing in the crisp fall air, Sather was already dreading Wednesday, when students in most of the Bend-La Pine School District will head back to class.
“I believe in education, and I believe that school should be a safe space for kids, and to have that shattered, it’s gonna be a hard drop-off,” she told OPB, as she played with her three-year-old and six-year-old at Larkspur Park.
“It’s impossible to know what to say.”
Teachers at all but Silver Rail will be back in class Tuesday to prepare, with students following the next day. It’s unclear when Silver Rail will reopen. With the return looming, some families don’t know if they’re ready to go back, while others are eager for a return to a sense of normalcy. Community members also have mixed feelings about plans to have police on school campuses this week as children return.
The district has promised extra security and counseling resources at Silver Rail for students and teachers. Bend police will also have a presence at all public and private schools in the community this week, said Bend Police Department communications manager Sheila Miller, though what exactly that presence will look like is still being determined.
“I think it’s gonna be hard for a lot of kids to go back to school because they all experienced this moment of complete shock on Thursday and they’ve been at home living with it all weekend,” Bend-La Pine School Board Chair Amy Tatom said. “They have traumatized younger siblings, and even if you weren’t in that building, we’re all going to remember the moment where we heard this was happening.”
The first hint that something wasn’t right at Silver Rail started Thursday with 911 calls about someone shooting at a pickup truck near the school. Within minutes, three children — ages 5, 8 and 11 — and a 25-year-old teacher were dead inside a special education classroom, and a 7-year-old girl and a 54-year-old teacher were critically injured. The suspected gunman, a 16-year-old boy who had attended Silver Rail, was shot and killed at the scene by a bystander who followed him into the classroom where he was struggling with another teacher.
Yet even with such a traumatic event, it’s generally recommended to reopen schools as quickly as possible as long as a safety plan is in place, said Kent McIntosh, an expert on school violence and a University of Oregon education professor.
The school where the shooting took place can take a little longer to reopen, as it’s important to clean up and restore the school so it looks normal, McIntosh said. That will be the case at Silver Rail, where hazardous materials crews could be seen working at the school this weekend.
“Many of our students and our educators can find comfort in established routines and continuing with schooling,” McIntosh told OPB.
Viktoriia Ivanova, a mother of three, said her children are eager to get back to school after being home since Friday and want to see their friends. They don’t go to Silver Rail but have been deeply impacted by the tragedy, she said.
“My youngest, she’s five, and we were talking with her about this, and she was trying to express her feelings. And she said, ‘It’s so painful for me that other kids lost their lives. I’m so sad that they will not be with their parents again.’”
While walking to the memorial outside Silver Rail, Bend father Brian Day said he was glad to hear of the increased police presence at Bend schools. His kids go to Trinity Lutheran, a private school where his wife is a teacher.
“Unfortunately, you have to have somebody that can shoot them back as quickly as they can. So we need to have some security guards or police officers or somebody in every single school or we need to arm the teachers,” Day said.
He added that just knowing there are armed security or teachers in a school could deter other potential shooters. For others, however, the shooting signals a need for stricter gun laws.
Tatom, the school board chair, acknowledged that not everyone would be comforted by a heightened police presence at school.
“The problem isn’t gonna be solved with putting more police officers in our spaces,” she said. “It was three minutes from start to finish. And five people lost their lives, and two were critically wounded.”
“We’re still not talking about the root cause because it’s too political,” Tatom said.
Day’s youngest daughter, Poppy, a fifth-grader at Trinity, said she isn’t sure how she feels about going back. Classes at her private school resumed this morning.
“You still have that feeling that you’re like, ‘This just happened, and we’re still recovering,’” the 10-year-old said, adding that maybe students should have the freedom to say when they’re ready to return.
Poppy’s mom, Stephanie, who teaches at Trinity, said she doesn’t feel ready to go back either. She said she needs time to process and grieve so that she can help her students do the same when they return, adding that she wants to give them “stability and a safe place to land.”
“I don’t feel ready to do that yet,” she said.
Stephanie Day continued, saying teachers also need training on trauma-informed teaching. That sort of training can help teachers connect with kids when they need it the most, she said.
Those connections, she said, could help prevent kids who are quietly suffering from “falling through the cracks.”
“I think what happens in cases where kids end up committing violence. It’s kids who are suffering, and no one knows,” she said.
As the community moves forward, Tatom said she keeps reminding herself of the Silver Rail motto: “Kindness matters.”