Tragedies renew focus on helping teens
Lessons learned from events such as Tuesday's school shooting could also be applied to younger children.
A teenager in New York walks into a high school and seriously wounds two other students.
Five high schoolers characterized as "the outcasts of the outcasts" in a quiet New Jersey suburb allegedly beat and sexually assault a 13-year-old girl.
And in Florida, a 15-year-old boy steals a plane and kills himself by ramming into a skyscraper.
These events, all from the past two weeks, are obviously dramatically distinct from the lives of millions of American teens. But more than one expert in adolescence calls such incidents the "tip of the iceberg."
Below the surface, these experts also see a larger issue to be addressed: a disconnect between adolescents and adults in contemporary culture. But they signal hope that this emotional fissure can be bridged - by gleaning lessons from each tragic incident and by applying them not only to adolescents, but also to children in elementary school. It will take political will in the form of increased financial support for schools, as well as cooperation between schools, community groups, police, and families.
"I'm with Dickens: 'It's the best of times and the worst of times,' " says William Pollack, an expert on adolescents and school shootings at the Harvard Medical School in Boston. It's the worst, he says, because while such heinous events are rare, they're also increasing. There's also what he calls a growing sense of "incivility, disconnection, and hurtfulness" in American schools.
On the other hand, "The best of times is that as we see more of these horrible events, more people are starting to say we have to look at our society and our culture and start making changes in schools and create support systems for kids so their lives don't have to go that way," he says.
The school shootings in the mid-1990s sent out the first major distress signals. Teachers, school psychologists, experts in adolescent behavior, and federal officials began an intensive study of the potential causes of such adolescent rage, even before the horror at Columbine in 1999.
One of the researchers is Kevin Dwyer, of the American Institute for Research, a think tank in Washington. After the shooting in Jonesboro, Ark., in 1998, he worked with the FBI and put out a pamphlet to help identify kids who may need extra attention. More than a million copies were distributed to schools around the country.
In the months before Columbine, Mr. Dwyer even gave a talk on safe schools to all the school boards in Colorado. "It's very painful for me. I guess I didn't really hit the mark," he says.
Still, Mr. Dwyer says things have improved, and he rattles off the names of a handful of school systems - Westerly, R.I., LaFourche Parish in Louisiana, and Cherry Creek, Colo., among others - that are taking early warning signs seriously and successfully intervening with troubled kids.
He calls them "islands of hope in a sea of despair." Simply put, they have adults there for kids to talk to when they're stressed.
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