On the afternoon of December 30, 1974, Anthony Barbaro, a well-respected honors student at Olean High School in Olean, New York, entered the school armed with two rifles, went to a third-floor window and started shooting. When he was done, three people were killed, eleven others wounded.
This was the first FBI-recorded school shooting, and it happened in my school.
In the 27 years I have taught here, I have almost never heard this event referenced or discussed at length.
What little information exists online contains contradictory details, so I reached out to classmates and teachers of the shooter, as well as people who were at the scene, to slowly put the story together.
Most people I talked to still felt uncomfortable broaching the subject 50 years later. An overwhelming majority of these people said I could take notes, “but please don’t include my name in whatever you write.”
I responded, “I just want to present the facts.”
“Any story you tell isn’t just about the facts,” one witness told me.
“True, but I want to keep to the facts as much as possible.”
*
My family and I made Olean, New York our home in 1993, and I became a teacher in the high school in 1999, my husband joining me as a colleague three years later. I would say that all but a few students who graduated from Olean High School over the past 25 years were instructed by either me or my husband at some point. All four of our daughters are OHS alumni. At some point along the way, the city of Olean embraced us, adopted us, so I feel I’m in a unique position to tell the story of the Olean High School shooting. As the narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, says, I am “both within and without.”
Olean High School sits atop a hill in the downtown of the small (pop. 18,600 in 1974) town, facing busy West Sullivan Street, on the block between 3rd and 4th Streets. A sense of this geography is important to understanding the atrocity that occurred on that day shortly before 3pm, a partly cloudy, dismal afternoon, unseasonably warm at 31 degrees, with a slight northwest breeze.
Barbaro entered, leaving the motor running, carrying a rifle slung over his shoulder and another one under his arm, a bolt action high-powered .30-06, a 12-gauge shotgun.Students were on winter break on Monday, December 30th, 1974, but the building entrances remained unlocked, as several secretaries, administrators, and custodians were working in the school, hours away from a couple of days off to celebrate the upcoming year.
Anthony Barbaro, known as Tony, a 17-year-old senior, red-haired, slightly built, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, and eighth in his graduating class of about 290, had devoted time over winter break to filling out applications to college, military academies among them. He had just learned that he had won a Regents’ scholarship, a New York State tuition assistance program for bright students.
He left his home on South 8th Street, in combat fatigues to go “target shooting,” as he told his brother. Instead, he made the three-minute drive to Olean High School, three-quarters of a mile away, and parked his mother’s car, a blue Cutlass, along the 4th Street side of the building. Barbaro entered, leaving the motor running, carrying a rifle slung over his shoulder and another one under his arm, a bolt action high-powered .30-06, a 12-gauge shotgun. He was also carrying two large bags containing headphones, an empty glass coke bottle, black electrician’s tape, rope, a can of blue spray paint, a portable tape player, a tape of Elton John’s album Caribou, a gas mask, and ammunition for both weapons.
He had been on the rifle team throughout high school and was an exceptional marksman. The team was co-ed his senior year, Title IX having been enacted in 1972.
Target practice was held in the Olean Armory, right next to the municipal building, a couple of blocks away from the high school. But Mrs. Perry, a school mother who pulled behind Barbaro to park on 4th Street, didn’t think it was odd that he was carrying two guns into school. She assumed it was “just rifle practice,” as she testified during the arraignment, and allowed her two fifteen-year-old twin daughters to go in after him. One of the girls had left her purse in her locker on the third floor and was going to retrieve it.
Barbaro ascended the front stairs to the third floor and proceeded down the hallway in his business-like, purposeful gait which a former teacher at the school said characterized his passage from classroom to classroom. He looked at the girls as they passed by him in the middle of the hallway but then turned his gaze forward to the door to room 316, directly above the main entrance, leading to the yearbook office and the student council office.
The girls turned down the 3rd street hallway where the locker was, but before they could retrieve the purse, they heard two shots, then raced toward the back stairs, and exited the building.
Finding the door locked, Barbaro shot the lock off. He walked down the short hallway, approximately six feet, passed the yearbook office on his left, and stood in front of the student council door straight ahead. That door was locked as well, but had glass panes, which he smashed.
On the far side of the student council room were windows and a view of the spacious lawn, roughly the size of a football field, with a network of sidewalks leading to West Sullivan Street, 3rd and 4th Streets, and both intersections. A student could look out over the tops of half a dozen magnificent oak and maple trees, though bare that time of year, and have a breathtaking view of the neighborhood, Olean High School having been built on top of Sullivan Hill.
The two custodians had seen shotgun shells in the hallway, and a black cloud of smoke hanging “as if it was coming from the ceiling.”The twins reported back to their mother, who was still waiting in the car, that they “didn’t want to go back up there.” However, Mrs. Perry insisted that the shots were only the rifle team target shooting, and sent them back up for the purse.
The two girls returned to the third floor and saw smoke. Barbaro had set a small fire in the hallway using a pile of cardboard and, for extra measure, had lit a homemade smoke bomb (some reports refer to it as a smudge pot).
The girls went down to the main office on the first floor to report the fire. Meanwhile, Mrs. Perry heard other shots and saw a rifle pointed out of a 3rd floor window. She rushed into the building. A school administrator, George Pancio, in charge of special projects, hurried past her not hearing, or at least not registering, what she was saying. Pancio, having heard some commotion, had stuck his head out an office window and seen above him the barrel of a rifle. Pancio, along with two other district employees, were on their way to the third floor. Mrs. Perry followed them.
Pancio and his colleagues didn’t know that two custodians, Earl Metcalf and Joseph Kosidlo, had already gone to investigate “hearing about five shots” and the fire alarm ringing on the third floor. The two custodians had seen shotgun shells in the hallway, and a black cloud of smoke hanging “as if it was coming from the ceiling,” according to Kosidlo’s testimony.
Metcalf opened the outermost door of room 316, despite the doorknob having been blasted off, Kosidlo behind him, and stepped into the vestibule. Kosidlo testified that he saw a “shadowy figure and gun through the frosted glass to the inside door.” As he simultaneously urged Metcalf to leave and turned to flee, he heard a shot and felt a push, which he thought was Metcalf, fleeing behind him, but was Mr. Metcalf’s body, dead immediately, shot in the chest at point blank range.
“Tony had to be out of his mind,” said Mrs. Fish, the longtime yearbook advisor (including for the 1975 yearbook, the year Barbaro would have graduated) “because Mr. Metcalf was such a nice man. Such a nice man. He was loved by everybody. Everybody. Did you know he was getting ready to retire in a few months? Everybody loved him, truly.”
The yearbook staff had begged Mrs. Fish to meet that afternoon, as a 50-page deadline was approaching. Mrs. Fish, however, had already promised to take an aunt to an appointment in Buffalo, and denied their request. Jim Griffin, the student council president, had had plans to paint the student council office, but he and a friend decided to go skiing instead. It will never be known whether Barbaro expected anyone to be in room 316.
After killing Metcalf, Barbaro barricaded the student council room door, tying a rope around a couch and lashing it to the door. He set down his gun long enough to play the Elton John song, “Ticking” from the Caribou album. The song’s lyrics narrate the story of a young man who enters a Queens bar and goes on a shooting spree, leaving 14 people dead.
Around the same time as Barbaro was barricading the door, Kisildo met Pancio and the others on the way. They returned to the third floor and Pancio rushed forward to drag Metcalf’s body away from the smoke, thinking he had just collapsed from smoke inhalation.
Barbaro proceeded back to the window overlooking the front lawn and West Sullivan Street, attached a Starlight scope—that he had just received as a Christmas gift—to his rifle, and started looking for targets.
Pancio moved Metcalf’s body about ten feet before he saw the blood streaks along the corridor and realized the man was beyond saving. Pancio and the others rushed down to the board office to phone the police. Eventually one of Pancio’s companions convinced the distraught Mrs. Perry to go down to the boiler room for safety. She had no way of knowing that her daughters were safely locked in the main office with four secretaries, in a room the size of a closet with a lock as imposing as a bank’s safety deposit vault, intended to keep state exams secure.
A gun shot disabled Wayne Dutton’s purple car on the corner of West Sullivan and 3rd Street. His wife and three small children were passengers.“We took turns, the other secretaries and I, sitting with the girls in there,” said Mrs. Clawson, a petite, friendly woman who teachers described to me when I was first hired as the person truly running the school. I would come to learn there was some truth in that. When she announced her retirement several years ago, there was genuine wringing of hands.
“There was no panic bar in the vault back then, so once it was closed, it was closed until someone with the combination could open it,” she went on to say. “We didn’t want to close the door until it was absolutely necessary.”
*
At that moment Cynthia Wright, driving south on 3rd Street, having picked up her sister, Carmen Wright Drayton, 25 years old, and their younger brother, 12-year-old Julius, were on their way to get their blind father for a shopping excursion. While stopped at the intersection of West Sullivan, a bullet shattered the windshield and struck Carmen in the head, the broken glass causing facial cuts to Julius. Cynthia, seeing Carmen and Julius bleeding, sped to the hospital, one minute away, but Carmen was pronounced dead on arrival. Julius had wounds to his eye and face but survived.
Carmen had been pregnant with twins. The death toll for the Olean High School sniper attack is always reported as three people, not five. That the unborn children were not included in the death toll must have been unfathomably hard for the family of Carmen Wright Dayton. As the judge explained during Barbaro’s arraignment, the state law does not make provision for unborn children.
The first fire truck to arrive at the scene from Station 1, located on 1st Street, was driven by 43-year-old Herbert Elmore, the first Black firefighter in Olean’s history, with John Snopkowski, 59, riding in front. Elmore was driving up 4th Street and had just received radio instructions to go to the 3rd Street side of the building. Elmore turned right onto West Sullivan Street, planning to go past the front of the building and then to turn left onto 3rd Street.
“There were three rapid explosions which the men did not immediately recognize as shots,” according to the Olean Times Herald article “Heroes? Olean Fireman Had Them.” One bullet “ripped through” Elmore’s head. Another entered John Snopkowski’s abdomen, another grazed firefighter William Fromme’s head, and another struck Earl Weidt in the arm.
Elmore had fallen over in his seat. Snopkowski, though injured, exited through the passenger side, and waved off the second arriving firetruck, warning the firefighting team of danger.
Neal Pilon, a gas company employee on a coffee break at Johnny’s Newsstand, heard the sirens, hopped into his orange and black company truck, and followed the fire trucks to the scene, thinking he could be of service in case gas lines needed to be shut off. He was turning onto 4th Street when his right window was shattered by a bullet. He stepped out of his vehicle and ran toward the corner of the lawn where the second fire truck was pulling up, waving his arms, maybe also to warn the firefighters of danger, when he was shot, grabbed his side, and circled around until he crumpled into a heap. He lay there for a moment then called, “Come. Help. Me. Somebody.”
“We were scared that the shooter—we saw the bodies and we saw the cars—we saw Mr. Elmore—we were scared that the shooter was calling to see if there was anybody in the office.”Fireman Frank Ensell, who drove the second firetruck to arrive, was able to maneuver his truck along the side of the first one using the open driver’s side door as a shield, crouching with his right foot on the accelerator while hopping on his left foot.
The firemen noticed Pilon, but every time one of them tried to get beyond the protection of the trucks, Barbaro fired at them. When Pilon at last attempted to beckon someone to help him by raising his arm, Barbaro shot him in the head. He made no other movement.
A gun shot disabled Wayne Dutton’s purple car on the corner of West Sullivan and 3rd Street. His wife and three small children were passengers. Mr. Dutton got out of the car to check the engine, although he was puzzled over what engine trouble could have made the horn go off.
He saw the firemen and policemen motioning and yelling, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying, so he headed nearer, toward the rear of his car and that’s when he was hit, a bullet going through his wrist into his stomach. A civilian, Jack Marsfelder, rushed over to help him control the bleeding.
Dutton’s wife and children crouched down on the floor of the car, but Dutton’s oldest son, 7 years old, was hysterical and kept trying to crawl out of the car. Marsfelder helped the seven-year-old get out of the vehicle and instructed him to apply pressure to his father’s wounds. Meanwhile, Marsfelder let the air of the tires to lower the car for protection from ricocheting bullets. Mrs. Dutton was able to keep the two youngest children down and the oldest son was kept calm by seeing that his father was still alive. The horn of the purple car blared steadily for nearly two hours.
Three dead—Earl Metcalf, Cynthia Wright, and Neil Pilon—in a span of just over 10 minutes and nine more wounded. Everyone nearby was in immediate danger.
Herbert Elmore’s family listened on the scanner as he was named a victim. “Victim is critical,” his family heard someone shout. Mr. Elmore clamped his hand on the top of his skull, holding it in place for the two hours the standoff lasted, which probably saved him from bleeding to death.
Meanwhile, in the main office, secretary Fran Clawson said the phone rang a few times before anyone dared to answer it. “We were scared that the shooter—we didn’t know at the time who it was, but we could look out of the window—we saw the bodies and we saw the cars—we saw Mr. Elmore—we were scared that the shooter was calling to see if there was anybody in the office. After a while we answered and communicated with the police. They said that we could call our families and tell them we were alright.”
Olean police, Wellsville police, New York State police, National Guard… in total over 100 law enforcement officers responded to the scene.
Bill Aiello, the current mayor of Olean, having been at the scene as a rookie police officer at the time recalled, “I can still see…still hear people yelling to get down as we ran across the yard because there were people laying in the road that had been shot.”
Aiello reported that Barbaro shot a squirrel running across the electric lines by the street, 185 feet away. When I asked someone about this, a person whom I knew to be familiar with guns, he said it would take some skill to hit a moving target at that distance. He also added, “with a .03-6? That would be the definition of overkill.”
In the student council room police found approximately 27 unexpended rifle and 30 unexpended shotgun shells along with 18 expended rifle bullets and 17 expended shotgun shells.The scene was broadcast live over the radio. Some of the policemen were busy convincing men with rifles who had positioned themselves in between the houses along West Sullivan Street, facing the school, to hold their fire. One bystander said he had brought his own high-powered rifle and scope and given it to early arriving police who were armed with only .38 caliber pistols. Another said, “I had him in my ‘scope for 40 minutes, but the police wouldn’t let me pick him off.”
By 4:45 pm, the National Guard brought a tank to rescue the victims, including Herbert Elmore, who survived, albeit with life-long debilitating injuries. Police entered through the back of the building as the sun was setting at 4:51pm. At 5:15 pm, Barbaro threw his weapons out of the window. Speculation is that he wanted a police-suicide.
Barbaro donned a gas mask, in anticipation of the use of tear gas. There were rumors that a relative gave Barbaro the gas mask that he wanted for Christmas and carried with him that day and there are rumors that he stole it from the Armory. (Rumors are presented with fact-like insistence in a story 50 years old. The strength of a rumor is directly proportionate to the number of intervening years). There is also a story that a popular teacher at Olean High School instructed Barbaro how to use that gas mask. If that is in fact the case, thank goodness the lesson didn’t stick for Barbaro hadn’t “cleared” it properly, which means he hadn’t sealed the mask securely, so before Officer O’Brien threw the third tear gas grenade into the broken pane on the inner door, he found Barbaro lying face down, arms outstretched, unconscious, with a portable tape player at his left ear. Officers took a “large knife that he had on his person” before lifting him onto a stretcher.
The police later explained that he used hollow-nosed bullets, also called hollow-points, which expand on impact, creating larger wound channels than the size of the bullet. When hollow-points hit a target, the meplat, or tip of the bullet, “will open up like peeling a banana.” The website, ammo.com, goes on to note, “If you hit a soft target, it expands on impact and sends that expanded bullet deep into the target, hopefully killing or incapacitating it instantly.”
In the student council room police found approximately 27 unexpended rifle and 30 unexpended shotgun shells along with 18 expended rifle bullets and 17 expended shotgun shells.
Tony spray painted the word “shit” on one salmon-pink wall. On the bulletin board was a photograph of the student council’s vice-president, John Elmore from a newspaper article, with the caption “Man of the Year” underneath. Jim Griffin, then student council president, had written “Our Hero” beneath the caption.
Barbaro obliterated the photo with blue spray paint.
John Elmore, student council vice-president, was the son of Herbert Elmore, fireman.
Anthony Barbaro was charged with three counts of murder. He “stood silent with a faint smile on his lips as City Judge James F. Crowley remanded him without bail.”
When school resumed on Thursday, January 2, 1975, there was a moment of silence over the announcements for the victims of the shooting, but after this, there were the usual reminders, meeting dates for various clubs, even the detention list, and life moved forward. Diane Scanlon, a classmate of Barbaro’s and now a teacher’s aide in the school, said “That kind of thing didn’t happen back then. People were in shock and denial. People believed it was an anomaly.”
Three weeks later, on Saturday January 20, 1975, despite freezing temperatures and blustery conditions, there was a parade in downtown Olean to welcome Herbert Elmore home from the hospital. One local politician commented that day, “Herbie’s home, and now we can put this nightmare behind us.”
Jim Griffin claimed that only when the St. Bonaventure University Men’s Basketball Team, which included famed player Bob Lanier, returned to town after losing a Final Four game in the 1970 NCAA tournament, and thousands of fans jammed the streets to greet the bus—St. Bonaventure University is located just some two and half miles down the road—had he witnessed so many people lining Union Street.
He added, “It was a celebration of life.”
*
Eleven months after Barbaro was arraigned, on November 1, 1975, he died by suicide, hanging himself with a bedsheet in the Cattaraugus County jail. In a note composed in jail Barbaro wrote, “I guess I just want to kill the person I hate most—myself, I just didn’t have the courage. I wanted to die, but I couldn’t do it, so I had to get someone to do it for me. It didn’t work out.”
The facts surrounding these events explain nothing about the years of silence that followed the darkest day in Olean’s history. Herbert Elmore’s son, John, commented that his family didn’t talk about it. In fact, what he knew “came mostly from Wikipedia.”
The reason for this silence, perhaps, comes from the character of the town itself. Nestled in a valley of western New York’s Enchanted Mountains, in the foothills of the Alleghenies, Olean gives the impression of a town in the warm embrace of its surrounding landscape.
Driving home from shopping in Buffalo or visiting our extended families in Rochester and the Finger Lakes region, heading south along route 16, or west along route 86, when I see the little pink clouds over the cascading hills at sunset and their patchwork shadows across farmland cut through with meandering creeks, all of it framed by vibrant green leaves against the dusty nightfall, it becomes obvious why these are called the Enchanted Mountains.
Students were reassured, but I wasn’t. Drills are usually announced ahead of time. I found myself hoping that I had missed the email announcing a lock out drill.Some consider Olean to be in the upper most region of Appalachia, a Rustbelt stereotype that— since 1974, the year of the shooting, has seen its population dwindle from 18,600 to 14,000. As with scores of similar towns across the region, declining populations are tied to declining industry; in Olean, several large corporations—including Dresser-Clark Industries which produced engines and compressors, along with the Olean Tile Plant—that once employed nearly everyone in town, have moved elsewhere or have become defunct.
Despite its decreasing population, Olean still appears to be a flourishing industrial town, especially recently, with the help of a TIGER grant from the US Office of Transportation to beautify downtown. The half-mile strip along Union Street (intersected by State Street) has been transformed into a charming stretch of smalltown America with flower beds in the median and all along the street where roses, daisies, phlox, coneflowers, zinnia, cosmos, and many other varieties seem to bloom continually. Roundabouts replaced all the traffic lights, and the overhanging electrical lines were buried out of sight. Infrastructure has been updated. A block-long pavilion was erected as a farmers’ market where local farmers sell their produce; new sidewalks contributed to the project’s name, “Walkable Olean.”
This transformation has benefitted the quaint local businesses occupying the early 1900s store fronts. Olean has managed to remain fresh and young, while still very much proud of its history. It is the sort of city where most restaurants and small businesses hang framed pictures of its sports teams, its famous patrons, its storied streets.
*
That Olean hangs on to its past is evident when I enter the high school building each day to teach English to high school sophomores. Framed pictures of the neighborhood schools in the district and about 100 plaques of notable alumni line the hallways.
The hardwood floors in my classroom, and many of the other classrooms, still have scars from the years when desks were bolted to the floors. When I am not conducting classes, I most often will be found sitting at my heavy oak presidential-sized desk correcting papers. The desk chair, the podium, and the book cabinets on the wall are oak as well.
The 65-inch smart board that was installed years ago and the laminate adjustable desks symbolize the contrasts in my school and in my town that I have come to love.
Proud of its history, that is, except for the shooting… and one other period of violence. During Prohibition in the 1920s Olean was known, along with the nearby towns of Salamanca and Braford, as “Little Chicago,” not least because Al Capone spent time in Olean on his stopovers between Chicago and New York City. The Olean Chief of Police at the time made it his mission to deter crime and, according to Steve Cocca in Western New York Heritage magazine, even had the courage to put Capone in jail for a night in 1926.
I initially thought the long silence after the sniper attack was because the town felt some responsibility for what happened. Barbaro’s mother “made an effort to visit each of the people affected by what happened,” indicating, I believed, that she felt shame and guilt and, by extension, the oftcited “tight-knit community” that Olean had been, also felt shame and guilt. The mayor at the time, William O. Smith, said “The boy is not an outsider. He’s one of our own….”
It was noted time and again in the articles that I read, and in my interviews, that Barbaro was a loner. One article implies that the community overlooked the warning signs, as a classmate of Barbaro’s said that “Guns, that was his whole life.” This classmate described how guns were prominently displayed in his friend’s bedroom and that once, Barbaro had mentioned in typing class, ‘how funny it must feel to be a sniper holding off people.’” A rifle squad teammate said Barbaro had wanted to “hold up” the Olean Armory and engage in a police standoff.
But this didn’t explain the contradictory accounts I read in such articles as the Olean Times Herald ‘s “Community Grieved for the Victims and the Shooter’s Family” that Anthony Barbaro was from a “good” family. He was an honors student; his father served in WWII. The principal at the high school, Lou Nichol, reported that Tony hadn’t caused any discipline issues.
In 1974, loners obsessed with guns was not yet a profile commonly understood to signal a potential school shooter.
I then considered the resentment I heard in the voices of the people I interviewed about the Newsweek and The Readers Digest coverage. These articles sensationalized the “darkest day in the history of Olean.” These articles, as one person I interviewed who was on the scene, “made it seem like our streets were dirt.” These articles were too brief to leave any room for complexity.
That people in Olean felt as though it was their story to tell and no one else’s, seemed evident in their initial reaction to the play Sniper, loosely based on the 1974 shooting, and produced in New York City in 2005. The play was written by Bonnie Culver.
“An Olean Times Herald writer called me,” Culver told me, “and he was really upset, questioning how I, a New York City playwright, could make money from the town’s pain.”
It turned out that Culver was originally from Port Allegany, a town just over the Pennsylvania border, and was shopping with her mother for a wedding dress in Olean on the day the shooting took place. As they were leaving Olean, they heard the events unfold on the radio.
Culver told me, “After the opening of the play, an article appeared in Times Herald, something like ‘Local Girl Makes Good, Has Play in New York.’”
Which led me to another conclusion.
The people in Olean took care of “their own.” They truly cared for each other. They were sensitive and careful. They are still sensitive and careful fifty years later, which accounts for their reticence.
There was an outpouring of community support and sympathy for Anthony Barbaro’s family, especially his parents. Countless newspaper accounts noted that the community shared their grief. The local paper refused to even interview the family “out of respect for their grief.” As a matter of fact, the community conspired to hide the Barbaro family from out-of-town journalists.
A red sheet of paper was slipped under my door. It was a sign of relief. It meant that a school official was going to unlock my door and enter.Certainly, all these reasons account for the years of silence, but I think most importantly the community was protecting its young people from what we might call today “victim syndrome.” People who suffer from victim syndrome feel they have no agency over their own lives.
According to one woman, an alumnus who had graduated before Barbaro was in high school, “We had fathers who fought in WWII. They saw terrible things. But you move forward. You’ve got to.” Another added, “keep in mind that there weren’t a lot of counselors back then. You had to deal with things.”
Olean was in pain but should be credited for moving beyond that pain.
*
Perhaps now enough time has passed to turn pain into meaning, as John Elmore has done.
Elmore, the vice-president of student council in 1974-1975, and son of Herbert Elmore, the fireman who was shot in the head, held his skull in place, and survived, is a lawyer. His plaque is in the front hallway of Olean High School as a notable alumnus.
Recently, John Elmore took on the cases of some families of the slain victims in the Tops Friendly Markets Store in Buffalo, New York. Killer Payton Gendron researched the zip code nearest him that had a large percentage of Black people. He then planned his attack and on May 14th, 2022, he murdered ten people, all of whom were Black, and injured three others.
Elmore’s work is a testament that it’s not too late for the community to perform acts of service, and confront the trauma that occurred on the day Anthony Barbaro entered the school building carrying his rifles. The grief that the Olean community suffered can, with actions like those of Elmore’s, be transformed into meaning.
*
Halloween 2024
There is some quibbling about Olean High’s designation as the “first school shooting,” since no students were killed in the rampage, but it’s hard to look past the fact the shooter was a high school student.
It is unnerving to teach in a school that has such violence associated with it. Each year since Columbine, on one of our opening staff days, before the students return, faculty are required to attend active shooter drills. We begin our school year with a somber tone. I can remember a time when the joviality over coffee and doughnuts bled into the first day for students.
Thankfully, up until this year, I haven’t had to implement anything I’ve learned, but unfortunately, on Halloween, my active shooter training was tested.
My study hall duty is in a basement room. I arrived at 10:34 on Halloween morning and unlocked the door for the students who were waiting in the hall for me.
During the first five minutes of study hall, I typically sign passes for students to go to the library, to the art room, to music lessons, to the testing lab, to guidance. This day was no different. I had just logged on to take attendance when “lock out” was called over the PA system. Students immediately asked what a lock out was. They had frequent lock-down and shelter-in-place drills, but a “lock out” drill was unfamiliar.
I shut the door, which I always keep locked, as I have been instructed, lowered the shade on my classroom door, and quickly started taking attendance at my computer. I used my normal teacher voice, confidently explaining, “Remember several years ago when someone robbed the bank in town? Administration called a lock out because the intention was to limit the movement in the building and to minimize the chance that the robber would find the high school to be a nice place to hide. A lock-out is when a threat exists outside the building.”
Students were reassured, but I wasn’t. Drills are usually announced ahead of time. I found myself hoping that I had missed the email announcing a lock out drill.
In my own classroom I would have been confident with my abilities to lead my classroom to safety. I was attentive to the emergency response training we have each year, and I had practiced lockdown drills in my classroom for over twenty years. But being in a study hall room, where I had never practiced a drill, was different.
Students knew what to do as soon as they heard “lock down.” They immediately and quietly took their places along the corridor wall.To further reassure students, and to reassure myself, I read aloud from the flip chart found in every classroom that lists the definitions of the various safety procedures that might need to be implemented. “Lockout drill. In the case of an external threat…”
Thank goodness the view from the study hall windows was obscured by the brick ramp that had recently been installed to allow for greater freedom of access, and students couldn’t see the armed officers in bullet-proof vests in front of the building. My students would have “freaked out,” as, apparently, happened in other classrooms, according to students I spoke to after the fact. Classroom teachers were able to quell the “freaking out” before it reached panic pitch.
As a study hall teacher, I was in charge of a greater number of students than a regular classroom, and I hardly knew some of them. And, it was, as I frequently told students, a “quiet” study hall. Full period study halls were quiet study halls in which students were expected to work on assignments. (As opposed to half period study halls closer to lunch, which are much more social.)
I had had no interaction with many of my students except when they had passes for me to sign.
It took me until the beginning of October to learn all their names.
Then, to my surprise, a lock down announcement came on the PA system. A robotic male voice repeated, “Lock down. Lock down. Lock down. The school is on lock down.” To go from lock out to lock down was, to my knowledge, unprecedented. I looked outside the window with horror as I thought that the danger that was outside moments ago was now inside.
This was no drill.
Students knew what to do as soon as they heard “lock down.” They immediately and quietly took their places along the corridor wall. There was a bit of confusion at first among my special ed students because there were chairs along the wall where they were supposed to be crouching.
I instructed, “Students along the wall, remain in your seats. Everyone else sit or kneel between the chairs and in the aisle.”
I allowed one student toward the back to remain in his seat in the second aisle with his headphones plugged in his laptop. He was a special education student and had had an outburst when I once asked to remove his headphones. I imagined the angle from a potential shooter outside the window that police officers who did our annual training told us to draw and judged this student to be outside of this angle, sitting safely out of sight.
For five minutes we heard “Lock down. Lock down. Lock down. The school is on lock down. Lock down. Lock down. Lock down. The school is on lock down” repeated every ten seconds. In the case of a drill, we would maybe hear it repeated a dozen times before it was announced that “this drill is completed.”
One student held his hands over his ears. Another student visibly shook. A couple of students rocked. One student hugged the stuffed animal she had brought in as part of her Halloween costume.
I tried calming down the student who was shaking, whispering “we are following the proper procedures. It could be that a student had a weapon with his costume, and they want to make sure there was no intent to harm anyone.”
She replied, “I know. But I’m scared.”
The student next to her rubbed her shoulders.
I looked over at the computer screen. I was about halfway through attendance. I should have brought my clipboard over with me and tried to take attendance from the seating chart I made but hadn’t updated in a couple of weeks. I should have made certain that the door which opens on to an adjacent classroom was locked. I should have closed the blinds on the study hall windows. Would closing them after the lock-down had been announced attract the attention of a potential attacker?
Suddenly the repetition of “Lock down; Lock down; Lock down” stopped.
Everyone expected to hear, “this drill is completed.”
But the silence afterwards was terrifying.
After around thirty minutes, two students along the furthest side of the wall started talking, one of whom pulled a ghoulish mask over his face. I hushed them. When they kept talking, I said in my most commanding teacher voice, “keep quiet.”
On the other side of the classroom wall giggling erupted, which rendered my exhortations futile.
A couple of my anxious students turned to me wide-eyed. I knew what they were thinking. They were thinking that if there was an active shooter, the giggling and the talking might signal that there were plenty of bodies in room 27B.
For another ten minutes I stood anxiously listening for any sign that this nightmare would soon be over.
A red sheet of paper was slipped under my door. It was a sign of relief. It meant that a school official was going to unlock my door and enter.
The lock rattled, the door handle shifted, and we all collectively held our breath for a moment before a guidance counselor stepped in. She reported that there was a threat, but the police had cleared the building, and she offered to see anybody who needed to see her.
“You will be in a shelter in place until an announcement comes on.” In a shelter in place, a teacher can conduct classes, but no one is permitted in the hallways. A “shelter in place” is most often called when a medical emergency occurs, and the hallways need to remain clear so that medical personnel can quickly move to the spot where they are needed. The students in my study hall returned to their desks.
Shortly afterwards, the shelter in place was lifted.
I went up to my classroom, thinking through what I would say to my 5th period class. We are not trained in what to say after a lock-down, although we are expected to be protective of our students’ emotional and social well-being. Certainly, my class would look to me to say something.
This turned out to be true. Instead of the normal buzzing when students entered my room, they sat silently in their seats, and I attempted to debrief what had just happened.
In the meantime, students who were being dismissed were announced over the PA system. I was constantly interrupted as I said, “I’m trying to think of whether as a parent I would have come to get my kids in this situation, but I trust the school system and I trust the police force. If the police force cleared the building, it’s about as safe a place as I want to be right now. Besides,” I added, “I have to work.” The students weren’t buying my attempt at light humor.
During the chaos in the hallway, as students were being dismissed, I continued, “we’ve got to learn something from this and work to make our future brighter. My mantra is to strive to reconcile myself with the past, engage and enjoy the present, and look forward to the future. Think about what lessons either you or the school could learn and think about what you can actively do to work toward a brighter future. Can you help a friend, a classmate, the school, the country, the world be better?” I was already thinking of ditching my journal prompt for the next day to ask students to consider these questions.
When the confusion and disruptions subsided, I handed back a quiz on a novel they were reading, Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston and went over it. I discussed the subject-predicate worksheet I had assigned to students using a paragraph from Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. I imagined myself on a skiff in the Atlantic Ocean, trying to catch a fish.
In short, I had tried the 1974 approach: okay, that was painful, but now we’ve got work to do.
By that afternoon, I only had one student in my otherwise every-desk-occupied last period class.
At the end of the day, as I was leaving the building, a colleague sardonically remarked, “Remember when there were bomb threats? Did you ever hear of a bomb detonated in a school? Those were the good old days.”
Our principal confirmed at a meeting held after school on Halloween that the call he received, “there’s a man with a gun outside your school” was a hoax.
Despite assurances from administration, “our schools prioritize safety,” safety is not assured. Once the thief enters your house, you never feel a sense of security again. The students I teach confront these uncertainties on a daily basis because of shootings which have occurred so often on school campuses. I would assume this, also, significantly contributes to the anxiety my students grapple with.
Over that weekend, I read the journal assignments my students composed. I thought about those students who admitted they had their cell phone with them at the time (“a point of emphasis,” we teachers were told, was to report anyone who had their cell phones on them) and so risked disciplinary action in order to tell the story of that Halloween. I thought about the numerous students who wrote “this was the most terrifying day.” I thought about the students who admitted to crying, whimpering, “bawling when it was all over.” I imagined a history teacher, whom one student wrote, without humor, “ripped off her claws from her crab costume and ran across the room.” I read as one student wondered, “am I going to die in a banana costume?”
I thought about those students who were talking during the drill. Maybe some couldn’t imagine an active shooter in our building. Maybe some couldn’t imagine an incident like the shooting in 1974.
I thought about the students who so dutifully complied with my instructions, my orders. They were the ones who looked to me wide-eyed, fearful, ready to obey my commands. They were the ones who clearly could imagine the terror of a school shooter.
Or, maybe they knew what happened here. Once.
