Even as I was driving toward the Yorkton Regional High School on Thursday afternoon, I could tell something was not right. I have covered the annual car show there for the last two years and, usually, it is a scene of controlled mayhem.
Even on an ordinary day, there are students coming and going or milling about talking or texting, a few maybe smoking just on the edge of the property.
On June 4, there was no one, everything to do with the car show was still in place, but it was as if everybody had been plucked from the grounds by an alien spaceship or something.
It was kind of eerie.
There was one adult there. He told me he had heard someone had shown up at the show with a handgun and the school was in lockdown.
Two RCMP officers showed up in an unmarked car. I asked them what was going on, but they were not in a talkative mood.
I quickly started making phone calls, of course, and soon had pieced together the basic scenario and got the story up on the Yorkton This Week website as soon as possible.
Developing stories are difficult to cover. Decisions about what to publish and what not to publish can be tricky. After all, it is our public duty to get the word out, but we don’t want to be alarmist, either.
In these cases, responsible journalists are careful to distinguish between facts and speculation. What we knew as fact was the school was in lockdown and the RCMP were investigating some kind of incident that school authorities were taking seriously as a potential threat, also attempting not to be alarmist.
We also knew, as fact, that there were rumours circulating that a man wearing a t-shirt as a bandana or possibly as a mask and carrying a gun had disrupted the festivities.
It may seem a fine distinction between reporting there is a man with a gun and there are rumours of a man with a gun, but it is an important one to make.
As we know now, it was not a gun. Unfortunately, in the absence of that knowledge, the threat has to be taken seriously even if it means locking down 11 schools because school shootings are all too common.
In fact, we don’t even hear about most of them. There have been almost 120 in North America since 2010 (at least three of those in Canada). Would you also be surprised to learn the most recent was just three weeks ago? Seven people were injured by gunfire in Flint, Michigan at the Southwestern Classical Academy.
It can happen anywhere, anytime, and the worst part is studies have shown there is not a typical profile of a potential school shooter.
Mitigating these types of incidents is a complex problem. How do we balance freedom and safety? How do we identify at-risk youth and intervene early?
There is a lot of good work going on locally in this regard. In 2013, the school divisions, RCMP, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Social Services, SIGN, Kids First Yorkton, Sunrise Health Region and Yorkton Tribal Council entered into a collaborative effort called the Community Threat Assessment and Support Protocol to deal with these questions.
Nothing can ever be 100 per cent effective in preventing these incidents, but people are working on it.
