Dumbledore might approve of Colony threat response

I took time during Christmas vacation to catch up on the really important things, like reading Harry Potter novels. I read the first four as they came out, but then I stopped. This past summer I accidentally read No. 6, so I was feeling the pressure to go back and read No. 5, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” Reading the novel provided me with an “Aha moment” as I contemplated recent events at Colony High.

If you haven’t read all the Harry Potter novels, let me provide you with a short summary: novel No. 5 takes place in Harry’s fifth year at Hogwarts, the school for wizards. Harry is about 16 years old, the average age of an American high school sophomore. As the novel opens, Harry and the wizarding community are divided in their belief about whether or not Lord Voldemort, the evil wizard, has really come back to attempt once again to take over the wizards’ world. Harry, having fought with Voldemort in the previous novel, knows he exists, and several prominent wizards are also aware of the threat. However, many distinguished wizards are in denial; not having seen the dark lord, they refuse to believe in his existence.

The small group of wizards alert to the dangers of Voldemort’s existence has formed a small resistance group, and Harry and several of his schoolmates want to participate in the defense of their community, but they are deemed too young, and therefore they spend much of the novel spying on the adults and attempting to find out the true nature of the danger they face.

Near the climax of the novel, Harry confronts his mentor, Dumbledore, the master of Hogwarts. He rails at Dumbledore for keeping him in the dark and claims that Dumbledore and other adults have acted inappropriately, mistreating the students whom he feels should have had access to everything the adults knew at the time.

We experienced a similar event at Colony High recently, with threats of school shootings appearing on bathroom walls both at school and within the community. Several students voiced their objections to the staff plan to apprehend the threatener, specifically the taking of handwriting samples from students under what some felt were false pretenses.

Fortunately, Colony High was not fighting the symbol of all the world’s evil, although some might describe the loss of security and the apprehension accompanying the threats as a type of evil. In our case, the perpetrator turned out to be a 14-year-old student whose motives, at least at this time, remain unclear, although no concrete evidence of a plan to shoot anyone was uncovered, despite the student’s access to multiple weapons.

Students and others who objected to the school’s actions claimed that they felt their rights had been violated, although it was made clear by both the Alaska State Troopers and several legal consultants that there was no violation of student rights. We asked every student in the school during one class period to write a short statement that contained several key words also appearing in the threats. It is true that the school could have used other methods to identify the threatener. We could have undertaken a systematic, schoolwide locker search, for example. District policy and signs in all Valley schools state clearly that lockers are district property and are subject to search at any time for any reason. However, consider for a moment the amount of time and disruption concomitant with such an action.

First, who would do the searching? Colony High has four administrators who could have conducted such a search; that would have meant 300 lockers per administrator. A thorough locker search, looking for handwriting to match or other incriminating evidence, would have involved going through student notebooks, planners, and loose papers, and, at a conservative estimate, would have taken at least five to 10 minutes per locker. Even if it could be done in two minutes per locker, that would be a minimum of 600 minutes, or 10 hours, spent searching lockers. That’s more than an entire school day. It would have had to be done on a weekend or at a time when students were kept in the same classroom all day, a physical impossibility. Additionally, suppose in the course of such a search administrators unearthed evidence of other illegal or inappropriate actions on the parts of students whose lockers were searched? What if they found notes about parties in student planners or evidence of consumption of alcohol or other drugs? Would they then have to follow up every suspicious item found in all the searched lockers? Just contemplating all the things that could be found in a search of 1,200 lockers is daunting.

Some who criticized the handwriting sample plan suggested that we should have narrowed the focus before getting the samples, but that seems to me to be even more discriminatory — who would decide which students were suspects whose handwriting should be checked? What if the student who ultimately was caught had not been singled out in the first place? Would we have tried again with another limited sample? Then we would have disrupted school with repeated searches, and students would be wondering who considered them suspects and why.

One of the things I like about the Harry Potter novels is that they point out the complexity of life both for adolescents and the adults in their lives. Although Rowling’s books take place in an indeterminate time period, they are very 21st century in that the nature of good and of evil is complicated and ambiguous. She shows us that the more difficult the situation, the less available are clear-cut answers.

When I began the study and practice of education, nearly 20 years ago, it never occurred to me that I would have to worry about students who would shoot me or other students in my school or who would even threaten such an act, but that is the reality of the world I am in. While I don’t believe in deception and suspicion, I know in this case that answers were achieved as expediently as possible, and the shadows of doubt and uncertainty that had been hanging over our heads have, for the moment, been vanquished.

Prudence Plunkett teaches English at Colony High School.