This American Life on School Violence and Student Deaths

In the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newton, Connecticut, the storytellers at This American Life brought us a show recently to remind us that student death and gun violence aren’t all that unfamiliar in many of America’s schools.

The two-part TAL episode follows the team for five months behind-the-scenes at Harper High School in Chicago’s West Englewood neighborhood, one of the city’s most dangerous. At the time of the report, 29 current and recent Harper students had been shot in the span of a year, 8 dead, due to a complex and inescapable gang organization in the neighborhood.

Stream or download the episodes here: Part One | Part Two

Without discounting the seriousness of events like the Sandy Hook shooting — or Columbine, Virginia  Tech, or the Aurora theater shooting — I have to pose the question of why they make such a splash in the news, while a steady stream of deaths out of Englewood go unnoticed across the nation.

The TAL report was striking; the students, teachers, and administrators at Harper live in a world many of us wouldn’t recognize. They live in a world that my colleagues in other parts of Chicago wouldn’t recognize, just a few miles away. The school’s principle struggles with the basic desire to give her students a normal high school experience while  gang violence makes them fear walking to and from the building. Dedicated teachers and staff devote extra hours of their day to council troubled students and mediate dangerous feuds, just to keep peace throughout the school day. A special grant is dedicated to funding a social worker on the staff to help the large number of students coping with violence or the loss of friends.

So why don’t we hear more about Harper High School?

The simple answer — all sociopolitical opinions, truths, and theories aside — is that it’s happening every day. Violence in the community around schools like Harper is just too commonplace to merit national headlines these days. And they’re not the only ones. To close the story, TAL host Ira Glass comments that they could have told a similar story in any city across the nation. Then we hear from*:

• Fenger High School on the far south side of Chicago, where 9 students have died in the past 3 years.

• King College Prep High School in Chicago, where 2 students were shot over the past Christmas break.

• Castlemont High School in Oakland, California, where 6 students have been shot in the past 2 1/2 years, and 2 killed.

• Furr High School in Houston, Texas, where 5 students have been killed in the past 2 years.

• Cohen College Prep High School in New Orleans, where 2 students were shot in the past year.

• Simon Gratz Mastery Charter High School in Philidelphia, where 9 students have been killed in the past 3 years.

• and Miami-Dade Public Schools in Florida, where 44 students have been killed due to violence in the past 4 1/2 years.

Sadly, violence in these schools happens too often to be shocking.

It’s not that we, as a nation, don’t care, of course. Listen to this report, and you’ll be as touched and moved to action as you were reading the news out of Newton, Connecticut. But we don’t want to — nor should we really have to — think about it every day. That’s not a burden we want to carry. Unique and seemingly passing tragedies are easier to bear; they’re brief reminders of our mortality, humanity, and responsibility to others before we’re able to slip back into the comforts of our daily routines.

What this TAL report reminds us, though, is that some people do carry this burden every day. They live constantly with these tragedies, the loss, and the fear. The report points out that funding for services like the social worker who helps kids cope with their fear and loss will soon be lost. Many listeners have reached out to ask what they can do to help, and to offer donations. If you’d like to help Harper, you can show your support here.

But don’t stop there. Don’t let this moving story be the last you think of until the next one. Seek ways you can reach out to help schools in your community, stay educated on the experiences of the people dealing with these issues day-to-day, or simply take a moment each day to reflect on the world around you.

*stats are based on the quotes in the TAL report.

Images courtesy of Harper High School and This American Life.