Last night a parent asked me to include on my prayer list the students of Sehome High School in Bellingham. Several of the youth of our church are students at Sehome and the things that occur at the high school have a broader impact in the church because they affect siblings and other family members as well as students who are attending middle school and anticipating going to the high school in the future.

It is hard to know where to start to tell the story. There will be no cases at Sehome today. In a statement posted on the school’s website, Principal Sonia Cole posted, “There will be no school at Sehome tomorrow, Thursday, December 9. to give our staff time and space to get in a better position to support our students when school resumes on Friday.”

For some of the students, the anxiety and disruption came to a head last Friday, when the school went into a two hour lockout because a 16-year-old student brought a Gloack-17 style airlift pistol to school. Law enforcement and school officials were able to identify the student, who was detained and later released to his parents. Charges of possession of a dangerous weapon on school facilities were referred to the prosecutor’s office. Students came home for the weekend after the incident with an elevated sense of anxiety. When the school goes into lockdown or lockout, instruction stops and students and faculty are often left with insufficient information to properly assess the threat. They don’t know if there is a weapon or perhaps an active shooter on the property. They don’t know what is going on. All they know is that there has been a threat that has been taken seriously by school officials.

We all talked about the incident over the weekend. It was mentioned int he pastoral prayer at our church, along with prayers for the victims of school violence all across the United States.

Then, on Monday, several students received a threatening message via AirDrop. School staff reviewed the message and called the police for support. The threat was determined not to be credible, but not before police had searched the high school and its perimeter. Officers were visible during the time between classes and student anxiety returned to a heightened level.

By this time, there were as many rumors flying as solid information. Some of the students were aware that there had been a three-hour lockdown last week at another school in the district, Ferndale High School. That indecent turned out to be a student bringing a BB gun to school.

Then, yesterday, Shame High School was locked down for an hour while school officials and Bellingham Police investigated yet another threat.

It isn’t surprising that the principal made the decision to close the school today to allow students and parents to process all of the recent threats and incidents. There is a lot of fear involved with just going to school. At least one family in our church picked up their student from the school early on Wednesday and simply brought the student home so that they could talk and process all of the stress of the past week.

Fortunately it appears that there is no direct connection between the cluster of incidents. Still it is unsettling to have so many incidents occurring so close to each other.

All of this is against the backdrop of school violence in the United States. There is a lag in the statistical reporting, but according to Education Week, there have been 20 school shootings resulting in injury or death since the start of the school year this fall. The deadly gunfire in Oxford, Michigan last month made the headlines briefly, but it quickly faded from the headlines as the news cycle moved on. School shootings, even those with multiple fatalities, are common enough that they don’t remain in the news.

We aren’t as directly affected by all of this right now because our children have become adults and our grandchildren are still elementary students. But we’ll have a middle school student next year and high school isn’t that far away. And the high school our local grandchildren will attend is among the ones that have experienced a lockdown in recent weeks.

I remember well the anxiety and fear that surrounded our children’s high school when multiple threats caused multiple evacuations of their high school in the wake of the Columbine school shootings.

Schools need to be safe places in order for learning to occur. When safety and trust are eroded, the ability of students to invest in learning decreases. It is hard to learn when you are paralyzed by fear.

Once again our pastors will struggle to find the right words to include in their pastoral prayers. Once again we will do what we can to help calm the fears of students and parents. Once again we will be asking ourselves, “How long can this go on? When will we be able to trust the safety of our children?”

There are no guarantees in life. It isn’t possible to be alive without encountering risk. And we all need to develop skill at assessing risk and avoiding unnecessary risk while assuming responsibility for certain risks that we take. That is part of the transition from childhood to adulthood. We learn to trust our children with increasing levels of risk. During their high school years they begin to drive and our fears elevate, but we do what we can to manage that risk and teach our children to drive safely, wear their seatbelts, and assess whether or not a driver has been drinking. We talk with them about highway safety and safe driving. There is a level of control that they are able to assume.

However, when it comes to gun violence, there continue to be incidents where that threat cannot be controlled. Despite strict rules, weapons are still coming into our schools. After a brief lull at the beginning of the pandemic, incidents of school violence are once again on the increase.

We owe it to our children to do a better job at managing this violence and decrease the threat. As the students, faculty, and administrators of Sehome High School take a day away from classes today, all of our community needs to make a fresh commitment to ending school violence.