By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
An armed graduate of a St. Louis high school killed one student and a teacher Monday morning before police shot and killed him.
Seven other students were shot and wounded at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School.
A deadly shooting so close to home worries any school administrator. And St. Joseph School Superintendent Gabe Edgar says that worry deepens because of the difficulty of preventing such random violence.
“I don’t know that there’s any way that you can completely stop anybody from doing something like this,” Edgar tells host Barry Birr on the KFEQ Hotline.
Edgar says the St. Joseph School District has upgraded school building entrances at all levels: elementary, middle, and high schools.
“A lot of our buildings were older and a lot of them did not have very secure entrances and a lot of them were challenging to make them secure,” Edgar says.
St. Joseph School District voters in 2019 approved a 61-cent levy increase with a portion of the $6.5 million raised annually to be spent on school security. In addition to securing school building entrances, communication methods have been upgraded and security officers added.
Edgar says school building security once wasn’t a concern for school administrators.
“When I started my education career in 1997, we didn’t talk about things like this,” Edgar says. “It’s very unfortunate, but I do think its twofold. There is a school safety, school security issue, but there’s also a mental health issue that needs to be addressed, not only in the state of Missouri, but in the United States of America and probably across the world.”
St. Louis police say Central Visual was secured, the doors locked. Still, the armed graduate of the St. Louis high school walked in with a rifle fully visible. He also carried plenty of ammunition in firearm magazines. The death toll could have been much worse.
Edgar says such incidents shock everyone in the education community.
“We just pray for the people that were in the situation in St. Louis,” Edgar says. “You never want to take for granted that it’s never going to happen to you or here, those types of things. It’s a constant communication. We’re continuing to talk about it every single day.”
The school shooting in St. Louis shortly after nine o’clock Monday morning sent students in the school scrambling to barricade doors and huddle in classroom corners. Some jumped from windows. Others ran out of the building. One terrorized girl said she was eye-to-eye with the shooter before his gun apparently jammed and she was able to escape.
The shooter, identified as 19-year-old Orlando Harris, was shot and killed in a gunfire exchange with police.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.