When the five or six shots were fired during dismissal at Woodrow Wilson High School last month, Principal Mike Moran was fewer than 20 feet away, although in the ensuing melee, he never saw the shooter’s face.
Many students were even closer to the young gunman in this terrifying moment amid 1,300 teens leaving the Old East Dallas campus March 22.
Frantic kids scrambled for hiding spots, parents sat helpless in their cars and the perpetrator escaped before the first police cars arrived.
Moran had suspected trouble when he saw an unusually large group of teens congregating just beyond the school’s football field. As he headed that direction, students yelled that a fight was breaking out.
That’s when the shooting began — the weapon apparently aimed skyward.
“That’s the closest I’ve ever been to gunfire and at first I thought it was fireworks, because that’s a problem we’ve had outside before,” Moran recalled. “Then I smelled the gunpowder.”
Typical of the smartphone world we live in, students recorded video and photos of the scene. After the staff at Woodrow and adjacent J.L. Long Middle School repeatedly reviewed those images, word came that the gunman was not a student at either campus.
Dallas ISD police have since tied the incident to gang activity and continue to look for the young shooter, according to DISD executive director Richard Kastl.
Even before the March shooting, Woodrow and Long administrators were on high alert because of previous incidents outside the schools.
Dallas police responded around dismissal time Feb. 1 to reports of a fight in Willis Winters Park, just across the street from Woodrow. The young participants fled, and officers confiscated one gun in the adjacent parking lot.
Another late afternoon altercation occurred on the edge of the park Feb. 10, this one involving J.L. Long students and at least one parent. As eight police cars rolled up, most of the kids managed to get away.
The violence leaves Woodrow with the same questions plaguing schools nationally: How to keep students safe and how to help the teens who are causing the trouble. While security is the immediate concern, genuine solutions will require doing both.
DISD trustee Dustin Marshall, whose district includes Woodrow and Long, told me that what’s happened these last weeks is worse than anything he’s previously seen in the district.
“Anytime there’s gun violence around schools, let alone at dismissal time when there’s hundreds of kids coming and going, it’s terribly troubling and a serious situation we have to act on,” Marshall said.
But the district also can’t lose sight of the kids who are showing signs of violence, he said. “Those are also students that we need to try to help.”
As students returned to campuses this school year, districts across the country have reported increased violence — bullying, fights, gang activities and drug-related incidents.
Experts had forecast this scenario based on the COVID-19-induced trauma of remote learning, loss of friends and financial and health crises within families. In December, the U.S. surgeon general issued a rare public health advisory about the mental health crisis facing young people.
For students already stressed and on edge, every new issue compounds the last and can lead to a spiral into aggressive behavior.
Moran’s sense is that Woodrow students and parents are split down the middle in their reaction to the incidents — half of them worried sick about the recent violence and half voicing few concerns. My conversations with adults and teens indicated the same.
Most everyone mentions bullying as the No. 1 problem — older kids picking on younger ones.
Another point repeatedly raised is the wide age range and huge campus population: Woodrow and Long are home to more than 3,000 students, ranging from grades six to 12.
Many parents also question whether Dallas ISD police and Dallas PD are partnering — or just pointing fingers at each other — on security at Willis Winters Park, a 16-acre community greenspace that is also the site of DISD sporting events and practices.
Under its interlocal park agreement with Dallas, DISD is on the hook during student-involved events. But that doesn’t mean it provides 24-7 protection.
If law enforcement groups weren’t on the same page before the shooting, they now seem to be. I live nearby, and my spot checks indicate a consistent police presence in the past two weeks.
Moran told me that some of those involved in the fights are teens who have quit school. Others are students who should be, say, a sophomore or junior, but because of academic problems, remain in lower grades. That includes high school-age students still in middle school.
“These are students who are really struggling to stay on track or to get back on track,” Moran said.
Moran and Kastl said these students increasingly become unconnected to their school and sometimes wind up in gang and drug activity. A student feels like he doesn’t belong, “so you join another group and unfortunately it’s an unhealthy group and that becomes your association,” Moran said.
Those students, in turn, try to entice their peers to join them — and harass those who won’t.
In response, DISD and DPD officers now are on site between 3 and 6 p.m. on school days. Additional Woodrow staffers are outside the building during dismissal.
Having the extra officers is huge, Moran said, not just from a safety standpoint but because that provides administrators time to walk around and build relationships with teens and parents.
“That will help them feel comfortable telling us stuff we need to know,” he said.
The PTA is compiling a fact sheet that will help everyone in the community know to whom they should report various types of problems.
Cameras are in place in the park, and more are planned for the campus. Moran also wants a study of traffic flow, particularly on Glasgow Drive where pickup and drop-off congestion makes spotting problems difficult.
Moran also is putting more thought into how to help those kids who — for whatever reason they feel they can’t be part of a school community — have formed their own social circle that gathers at the park, the nearby Santa Fe Trail or on campus sidewalks.
Those of us who have long followed the goings on at Woodrow know that while student diversity is one of its greatest assets, the socioeconomic gaps among its students can create challenges for the kids on the low end of that spectrum.
Moran said that in most urban schools, “90% of the students look like you. You have that fundamental similarity.”
But at Woodrow, “we have some of the most elite academic students, athletes and arts performers … and we have others who are not at that level who we are also committed to supporting.”
That’s why he and his team are giving post-pandemic thought to what it feels like for each student to walk into the current Woodrow environment.
Traditional thinking would be to get disenfranchised kids on a team or signed up for a club. Instead, Moran knows instruction time — those long hours from 9 a.m. to 4:35 p.m.— has to be rethought to ensure the school engages all students.
He wants to hold summer school at Woodrow to help teens catch up so they feel comfortable returning to class. Also on his “to-do” list is to better partner with parents who may also feel that they don’t belong.
Just before we talked, Moran had been at North Garland High School, a campus with demographics similar to Woodrow’s, in order to look for anything he might be missing.
No one principal or campus can solve a problem this complicated — one that schools nationwide are grappling with. But Woodrow has the resources and community support to lead the way.
As DISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa noted in a recent Q&A with Woodrow parents worried about the next time a kid with a gun is on school property:
“We can’t police ourselves out of this. These kids are volatile, they’re proving it, and somehow we’ve got to deal with the core.”
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