Colorado lawmakers and parents on Wednesday decried the state’s system for reporting school violence after a fatal shooting at Arapahoe High School did not appear in a statewide discipline report intended to give parents a snapshot of campus safety.
The December shooting is still fresh in the minds of parents, students and community members. But discipline data for the 2013-14 school year released by the Colorado Department of Education to The Denver Post offer no indication that student Karl Pierson killed senior Claire Davis and himself at the campus.
Littleton Public Schools Superintendent Scott Murphy said late Wednesday that the district reported the shooting to the state and to the federal government. But Murphy said he was not sure in which category of violence the shooting was reported.
Discipline data released this week by the state show Arapahoe had 107 incidents, but none were for the most violent categories of first- and second-degree assaults, dangerous weapons or other felonies. The district reported one incident as a third-degree assault, which is a misdemeanor in Colorado.
Schools are required by law to report incidents of violence annually to the Colorado Department of Education. Those reports are based on students who are punished, so some community members worried that because the gunman at Arapahoe shot himself and was not disciplined, the school district may not have included the shooting.
“Whether there is a loophole in the system or not, you know that there are certain things you are responsible for as far as reporting,” said Bonnie Simler, a former substitute teacher at Littleton Public Schools whose three children graduated from Arapahoe.
State Rep. Polly Lawrence, R-Douglas County, said such a loophole points to just one of the problems with the law that governs how districts report violent incidents at schools.
“Obviously, it shocked me because that was such a tragic event that was extremely well-documented, and I don’t know how you don’t list that on your school-safety report,” Lawrence said. “In that tragic instance, the student who brought the weapon to school killed himself and there was no one to deal with, so they didn’t report it. If that’s their reasoning for not reporting it, we need to fix that.”
Murphy said his district did not use such a loophole but instead reported the incident as directed by the state education department.
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Department officials said they are reviewing how the Arapahoe shooting was discussed and reported. The department also said it was combing through the data that was released publicly to determine whether it is accurate.
Spokeswoman Janelle Asmus did not say whether the school district had reached out to the department for advice on how to report the incident.
“The department is aware of and part of the conversations and discussion around the issue of safety and discipline reporting by schools and districts,” Asmus said. “In fact, we’ve been invited to explore these issues with Rep. Lawrence and are supporting that work with stakeholders to determine if there needs to be potential changes in the current law governing this issue.”
This week, Lawrence had the first in a series of planned meetings with educators and law enforcement officials to discuss strengthening the law that requires the reporting of violent incidents. The meetings are a result of a joint investigation by The Denver Post and 7News published in May.
The investigation found that more than a decade of school-safety information collected by the state was unreliable and lacked oversight. Some schools did not report assaults that police would categorize as felonies, while others recorded even small playground tussles between elementary students.
Among the findings of the investigation were that three high school campuses in Littleton Public Schools — Heritage, Littleton and Arapahoe — did not report an assault, robbery or felony in the past five years.
Lawrence said the school district was following the law, but the law needs to change to make sure all incidents are included, even if a student was not punished. She said she also plans to push for the reports to include descriptions of the incident and how administrators handled each case.
“As parents are reviewing the safety of their schools, they want to make sure that the information that they are looking at is complete, and we want to make sure that what we are putting out is accurate and that the reporting is transparent,” Lawrence said.
State Sen. Linda Newell, whose district includes Littleton Public Schools, said she hopes to host stakeholder meetings to develop a plan for strengthening the reporting requirements without adding cumbersome unfunded mandates.
“I absolutely understand that the parents want reliable information on the safety of their children’s schools,” Newell said. “We need to gather stakeholders to find out what’s working, what’s not working and to find ways to close gaps in the reporting without burdening (districts) with too much paperwork.”
Simler said the failure to accurately report violent incidents at schools threatens the safety of children.
“If there are other schools including Arapahoe that are conveniently not reporting what they know in their hearts, whether it’s spelled out for them or not, then you know the numbers you have are not true,” Simler said of the safety reports. “It’s giving false information to the community and a false sense of security to say that we don’t have a problem when we have a problem.”
