A Ladue student was arrested the morning of Nov. 18 while in possession of a firearm by Frontenac and Ladue police, who were alerted before the student had arrived on campus and apprehended them without incident. Police and security worked quickly and efficiently to keep the community safe, and they did; staff were informed in school-wide emails with instructions on how to handle student reactions; parents of students received emails confirming our safety and security. The only ones who remained uninformed were us: the students, whose safety was arguably most at risk.
In October, Panorama’s editorial board wrote about the burden that Ladue High School’s new OPENGATE security systems place on students and staff to take the initiative in ensuring our own safety, as well as the lack of measures taken to address the root problem of gun violence. But prescribed ignorance can be a burden in and of itself.
The administration probably didn’t want us to be afraid, to gossip, to fearmonger or to talk too much amongst ourselves. That might have been one of the reasons why they refrained from informing us about the arrest. But let me make something clear — we were going to find out what happened no matter what.
High schoolers talk, and nothing the administration or teachers do would be able to stop the inevitable grind of the gossip wheel. By lunch the day of, a substantial chunk of the student body knew that someone had been arrested. Our parents were informed via district-wide emails, and of course many of them told us, worried about our safety. That afternoon, after school ended, the story appeared on local news. By Nov. 19, just a day later, blurry videos were circulating on social media of the arrest itself in real time.
The question becomes, then — why did school administration feel the need to withhold this information from us and, in doing so, create an environment around the arrest that allowed fear and confusion to fester? Why not simply lay out the facts, shutting down any potential misinformation before the seeds could even be sown?
There’s a certain level of irony here. Regardless of our youth, we as students are expected to take responsibility for the day-to-day small things that have been implemented for our security, from meetings on safety to the ritual of OPENGATE to the systems like the anonymous tip lines that alerted police to the potential shooting Nov. 18 and ensured any threat could be preemptively stopped. This isn’t something that can be pinned on the administration or local authorities, instead finding its roots in systemic and historic issues — but it’s a reality that we all have to acknowledge exists.
Despite all the active and proactive measures we take in order to keep ourselves and each other safe, the administration thought fit to not only keep us in the dark about what happened Tuesday morning, but also instructed teachers not to initiate conversations about the arrest. We’re expected to take responsibility to an arguably unhealthy degree of our own safety and yet we are not given the tools to fully understand what’s threatening our safety when danger does show its face.
We inform, but are not informed in return.
Issues like these might seem like they lie in a gray area, one that often appears in debates around how much autonomy to give high schoolers. We’re mini-adults, basically — not old enough to drink but old enough to drive; self-aware, but with only mostly developed frontal lobes. That can create a unique tension when in the context of school policies: what content should we be allowed to consume? How much responsibility can we take for our own learning? Can we be trusted to use tools like artificial intelligence without crippling our own education?
But our safety, I can say unequivocally, does not lie in that gray area. Almost all of us, for better or for worse, are to some degree aware of the danger we are in every day, of the unacceptable violence that pervades American culture and of the horrifying numbers that pepper school shooting statistics — and we will never not be. Withholding this information from an elementary schooler is one thing, but we as high schoolers are on the brink of adulthood, active members of the community who contribute, work, drive, vote and live in this community — fear and all. This is not a time to linger on the fallibility of our squishy teenage minds or to debate over how much to inform us. This is a time to sit down with us, face to face, and tell us what’s happening, who’s at risk, what you’re doing to fix it and where we go from here.
