Schools using many lessons of Columbine

In the case of Weise, friends said that he had been haunted by his father's suicide several years earlier. He left Minneapolis to live with his grandfather after his mother was hospitalized with head injuries following a car accident.

Mr. Modzeleski and others are convinced the answer lies not in more metal detectors or school guards, but in a shift in culture. "It's easy to focus in on shootings, but we also need to look at what we're doing about harassment, teasing, bullying," he says. The real key is "putting adults in there that kids can talk to them when they have a problem, making sure they can listen, that they have the willingness to listen, and can provide them with guidance."

But even when warning signs exist, it can be hard for a school to piece the information together and recognize a kid in trouble. Often adolescents and adults don't communicate enough, says Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a consulting firm in Cleveland. "The pieces never seem to come together until after the tragedy."

He's seen a few schools start "child-study teams," in which staff and faculty meet regularly and share concerns about certain kids. "Everyone is typically so stressed for time, that if you don't make a conscious effort, it's very easy to lose a kid," he says.

Since fellow students are often the ones to say afterward that they had heard about plots but didn't take them seriously, schools are making efforts to convince them that notifying a staff member isn't "snitching." It's a way to save lives.

In many of the cases in which plots were uncovered before an attack - from Cedar Park, Texas, to Lovejoy, Ga. - the key was students who came forward. After the conspiracy was discovered in Marshfield, the school put in place an anonymous tip line. "A student can alert us to the fact that another student might be saying bizarre things or acting weird, 24 hours a day, seven days a week," says Thomas Kelley, superintendent of the school system.

One challenge, say experts, is that resources for antiviolence programs are scarce. Trump notes that President Bush's 2006 budget proposes eliminating the state grant allocations from the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools, a main source of antiviolence funds for states.

Nationally, the office works in some 150 communities, with programs that target students for mental-health treatment and try to promote a culture of safety. By tackling the little problems early on, they hope to keep the Jeff Weises of the world from ever getting to such a desperate place.

Other schools are trying a program modeled after Secret Service techniques. Administrators and students are trained to investigate and deal with threats, both big and small. In a pilot project in 35 schools, authorities resolved 188 student threats without any being carried out, notes Dewey Cornell, director of a youth violence project at the University of Virginia.

"One concern is that after a shooting like this there will be a backlash in schools. They'll tighten up zero tolerance, and begin expelling or suspending students who make any kind of threatening statement," he says. "That would be counterproductive, since it closes off communication."

Indeed, many experts note that the threats and interest in violence are often cries for help that go ignored. Weise is "part of the tragedy," says Viollis. "He's not just the villain here, he's a victim."

• Staff writer Sara B. Miller contributed from Boston.

Page: 1 | 2