If there is any school superintendent in the nation who currently operates without school safety plans in place (quite apart from the noticeable but ignored "thou-shalt-nots" festooned on campus walls and fences), s/he needs to regard—as a wake-up scream—the thunderous allegations of negligence, carelessness, child endangerment, a priori evidence of premeditation, contributing to the homicidal acts of minors, and even conspiracy hurled by a passing parade of aggrieved and angry parents, as they now set the pace nationwide in filing lawsuits over the on-campus deaths of their children, who in recent years were victims of school shootings or other violent acts. These are the parents whose sizable judgment awards and out-of-court settlements have turned the concept of in loco parentis into a sort of "boutique" hot stock du jour. In their minds no damage awards could ever compensate for the deaths of their children. Amid and after news footage showing children carrying lunch bags to school and the same day themselves being carried away in body bags, it is the very rare lawsuit alleging "negligent in loco parentis" that has been held by courts as being without merit.

The Parent Invasion
It is a new day in American school governance, and school administrators must recognize that, in our post-Columbine and post-9/11 climates, parents are holding them utterly responsible for ensuring the perpetual safe-keeping and welfare of their children. School officials and their general counsels must also understand that the wrath of grieving, surviving parents is being visited upon not only schools and school districts but also upon others whom parents deem responsible for their victim-children’s injuries or deaths—whether such occurred from homicidal acts or not. Newspaper headlines trumpet the plaintiff-parent lawsuits now approaching the $500-million dollar mark in the aftermath of Littleton, Colorado’s Columbine High School tragedy. In Norwalk, California, an $80-million settlement was reached with the family of a boy left paralyzed when he was struck in a crosswalk by a car driven by a school district employee. Parents of a 7-year old boy killed by a janitor’s utility cart at his Los Angeles school sued the school district for $84 million. Parents of a Westchester county (NY) football player who died after being punched at an after-school drinking party sued 14 teenagers, saying they caused their son’s death through misconduct and negligence. In this case the school was not targeted in the suit, since the party was after school hours and off-campus.

Now Is Not the Time to Wait
Rather than wait for the next violent school tragedy to occur, or for some legislative mandate, educators ought to begin developing comprehensive school safety plans…now! All high school districts in the country have clear and complete standards for the instruction and evaluation of their driver education and training courses. Likewise, school administrators ought to exercise the same diligence and develop comprehensive school safety standards complete with student and staff accountability measures.

It Takes Only One Child to Raze a Village
Following my 48-month in-person/in-prison interviews of 103 girls and boys incarcerated in state prisons for committing homicide and murder, Bobbie Battista, former host of CNN TalkBack Live, invited me onto her show where she publicly took me to task for stating that, today, children are going to school and getting executed, not educated. She said, "Every child who gets bullied does not become a murderer." My response was that "Historically, school violence has never been about ‘every child,’ most children, or the majority. School violence has always been brought to us by the few children in the minority we overlook or disregard, whose needs are greater and graver than we could ever imagine. The students in the minority whose names were Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris made Columbine High School the Pearl Harbor of school violence."

And I told Katie Couric, on NBC Today, "the weak—in a reversal of Darwin’s survival of the fittest—are now going after and taking out the strong." School boards and their superintendents can no longer afford to think their schools are idyllic paradises, immune to the sins and sizzles of the "greater out there." Short-sighted indeed is the school official who wraps herself in the cozy and complacent delusion that every child is simply not suddenly going to throw a gun into his backpack, along with his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and summarily "announce" his arrival at school with a broadcast of gunfire. Any school official who fails to see that the majority no longer reflects or represents what the FBI now calls the "student threatener," could be playing a deadly numbers game: 1 student can be more dangerous than 100!