Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Sanders walks to Parkrose High one spring morning.
BY BETHANY BARNES
The Oregonian/OregonLive
The worried father understood that when school officials said they were putting his teenager through a threat assessment, what they meant was “We think the next school shooter could be your son.”
Like almost every parent who sends a child to a school in America these days, Mark feared the next school shooting. He wanted to believe the school’s threat assessment system would help make sure Portland wasn’t the next Parkland.
So when a police officer came to his home without a warrant, Mark welcomed him inside. He handed over the family guns despite having no legal obligation to do so.
He told his nerdy, logical 16-year-old to be patient and remember what Spock from Star Trek always said: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
Be open, show you have nothing to hide, let the process work and you’ll be cleared, Mark thought. Yet here he was, about to bring his family bad news: Parkrose High still considered his son a threat.
As he pulled into the driveway, three neighborhood boys played outside before dinner, the way boys do, with toy guns.
How, Mark wondered, do you tell the difference between a normal interest in guns and a dangerous one?
As the body count from school shootings has risen, school officials across the nation have been forced to consider versions of this question. Administrators use detailed protocols and checklists to examine the circumstances of students who may pose risks.
The pressure to prevent the worst has grown as students have begged adults to make sure they aren't next to die. In a nation divided over gun control, school threat assessments offer another option: Find a way to control the student.
It’s uncomfortable territory for educators. They’re acutely aware that if they overlook the smallest sign, the consequences could be devastating and irrevocable.
To protect student confidentiality, those formal threat assessments are highly secret. But one Oregon family agreed to allow an unfettered view into their case as it unfolded. The family provided documents and records of meetings with school officials and allowed a reporter into their home for extended periods over several months.
They did this, they said, because they hoped making visible the experience of undergoing a threat assessment would inform the debate about how to keep students safe. What happened to their son sheds light on how the desire to thwart a shooting can have unintended consequences.
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Sanders plays video games in his room.
Because of the sensitive nature of the topic, The Oregonian/OregonLive is not publishing the family’s last name and refers to the son by his middle name, Sanders.
Inside the house, Sanders sat on the sofa under silver letters hung with care: “This Home Believes.” He was lit by the green glow of a tank that housed a bulbous goldfish Sanders named Bakuhatsu, the Japanese word for explosion.
The first thing Sanders wanted to know was if his dad had gotten a copy of the complaints against him. His school’s nervousness about Sanders was fueled by heightened fear after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida left 17 dead. But why Sanders had come under scrutiny in the first place was mysterious. One, maybe two people from “the community” had written the school a week and a half after Parkland, a school official told them. The family had also heard a rumor that a student had said Sanders goes by the nickname “Shooter.” Sanders told officials no one had ever called him that.
What if the catalyst for all this was simply bad information?
Mark had read, several times over, the email from the school district’s student services director, Michelle Markle, outlining what the school district was willing to say:
“We won’t share the actual email from the concerned parent with you. However, I can tell you the content mainly had to do with these two things:
-dress/attire/appearance
- fascination, obsession with guns, knives, etc.”
Markle and other key Parkrose officials declined numerous requests to speak to The Oregonian/OregonLive about Sanders’ case, even though the family waived all privacy rights and put in writing that the district should speak candidly about their son.
“We stand firm in our commitment to the privacy of our students, staff and families,” Markle wrote in an email. “Schools and districts have the difficult challenge of weighing the rights and needs of the individual student against the rights and needs of the school as a whole.”
It was easy to figure out why the teen’s attire worried people. Sanders’ signature piece of clothing was a big black trench coat.
Years ago, Mark gave Sanders the riding coat he picked up on a youthful adventure in Australia. Sanders loved the weight of the coat. As a person on the autism spectrum, he welcomed the heaviness. It provided comfort in a world that often overwhelmed him. He wore it no matter the weather. With pride, he would note that when it gets above 85 degrees, it will be 104 degrees inside the coat, a fact he learned in science class. He was so associated with the coat that one time he didn’t wear it, he was marked absent by mistake. Sanders eventually wore out Mark’s old coat and his grandma got him a new one for Christmas.
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
The family dog sleeps on Sanders' trench coat.
Now, what had begun as a beloved hand-me-down, an armor that made Sanders feel secure and protected from the world, made him vulnerable.
It was hard for Mark to see his son in pain, and although the school district’s email had stressed that Parkrose officials "care greatly" for his son, Mark felt they weren’t really seeing Sanders.
Instead, they saw a symbol, another kid in a trench coat, whose hair could be a little greasy some days, who was blunt and impatient when he felt others weren’t following the rules.
A kid who maybe fit a “profile” that evoked the moment in American history that everyone remembers each time a school shooting makes the news: Columbine. The two angry young men who killed 13 people at their Colorado high school had worn long black dusters, and rumors flew that they were part of a “Trench Coat Mafia.” While the lore around the trench coats was later debunked, it became a key part of the myth that surrounds the tragedy. Ever since, there has been inevitable unease about any male student viewed as a loner who wears a long dark coat.
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Some of Sanders' various collections. From left: silhouettes of weapons, some realistic some fantasy, that he made out of wood; toy space ships; an assortment of knives from his room; his toy Nerf guns.
But his son, he felt, didn’t fit that profile. He is a boy who loves to figure out how things work, who adores the family dog, a picky eater who insists on sprinkling every dish with shredded cheese and spritzing it with honey before eating it.
Mark told Sanders he still didn’t have a copy of the complaints or the report from the officer who had come to their home. Instead, he’d been told that to stay in school, Sanders had to agree to be randomly searched at any time. He would also be under something called discreet supervision and need to check in and out with someone at the school each day.
Also, he couldn’t bring his scissors to school anymore.
“They’re scissors!” Sanders groaned. “If they want that to happen, then they better put some left-handed scissors there.”
“Then you get some left-handed scissors that don’t have sharp points on them and you don’t sharpen them to a point,” Mark replied.
“I never sharpened them, Dad.”
Sanders handed over the scissors for his dad to inspect. Mark held them up by their gummy handles and squinted. The blades, about the size of a small pair of fingers, were covered by a plastic guard. Mark looked closer.
It was possible, Mark thought, that Sanders had sharpened the scissors as the school claimed. Sanders went to a blacksmithing class after school and could make swords and knives. Still, there had been a lot of misunderstandings about the scissors. At some point, someone at the school had mistakenly thought they were a knife. School officials made a big deal out of the fact that Sanders, when asked if the scissors were a weapon, noted they could be.
This response should not have surprised anyone familiar with autism, Mark told himself. Because of his disability, Sanders took most things literally. He struggled to understand others and had trouble making himself understood.
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
The scissors Sanders brought to school that raised concerns.
Sanders’ favorite class, the one he needed the scissors for, was theater tech. He cut cloth used for scenery. Now, Sanders felt nervous about going. A power drill, Sanders told his parents, could also be a weapon. He didn’t know if simply building a set for the next musical would freak everyone out.
Sanders had been drawn to theater because his school had no woodshop class. He loved to build, to study the way things worked. His parents suspected their naturally handy son might want to go to a trade school and make a career out of it.
Now, Sanders’ main interest, the skillset Mark saw as Sanders’ potential ticket to a steady paycheck and a normal life, was under scrutiny.
Sanders felt so antagonized by the pressure of the suspicions, some days he skipped school. His parents worried whether he would even graduate.
Mark told Sanders that he tried to convey to school officials how jarring this had been for Sanders. Sanders, Mark told them, wanted to “punch out” whoever complained.
“And you said I’m making it worse!” Sanders chuckled.
It seemed to Mark that this system risked making a student who wasn’t violent, violent. What if this system created the very thing it was trying to prevent?
Sanders felt singled out and criminalized. Mark couldn’t blame him. He found it hard to explain the threat assessment process to a son who demanded the world make sense in concrete terms. But he tried to distill what Markle had told him at this latest meeting.
“She is not willing to say that there is no threat or no risk in the same respect that you could not say that a pen is not a weapon,” Mark told him. “There is always some level of risk.”
“They need to understand that their protocol doesn’t help things it makes things worse,” Sanders responded. “Have they understood that yet?”
“No.”
“Then they are idiots! They should not be in charge of the school.”
“Sanders, wait. No, they don’t understand that yet. You and I and Mother, through this process, are trying to bring them to that understanding. OK?”
“OK.”
“You on the other hand,” Mark said, “need to hold it together.”
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Fish tank in the family's living room that houses a goldfish Sanders named after the Japanese word for explosion.
Before Columbine frightened a country glued to the 24/7 news coverage, there was Thurston High.
In 1998, an angry teen boy in Springfield, Oregon, killed both his parents, then went on a rampage at his school. He killed two students and wounded 25 others.
President Bill Clinton visited Thurston High after the shooting. Against a backdrop that included a banner that read “Let It End Here,” he declared that he had directed the secretary of education and the attorney general to give guidance on warning signs so the next school shooter could be stopped.
Clues were there, the thinking went, they had just been missed. What schools needed were better systems to capture relevant information and respond before the worst happened.
One Thurston student, for example, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that months before the shooting, he’d overheard the gunman talk about killing. At the time, he said, the talk sounded to him like a video game.
The FBI was known for takedowns of crime syndicates, not angry youth. But shortly after Thurston, it issued a recommendation: Schools should find a way to assess threats posed by individuals who raised suspicions.
An Oregon school district is often credited as the first to heed this call.
John Van Dreal created a step-by-step threat assessment system in his role as a psychologist with the Salem-Keizer school district. He said he knows of districts in nine other states that have either been trained on it or have purchased the book he wrote and contacted him for further support. The Parkland school district’s threat assessment handbook credits Salem-Keizer as one of its sources.
In the Portland area alone, more than 300 students underwent formal threat assessments this school year. Oregon’s largest school district, Portland Public Schools, recently hired a threat assessment coordinator.
The protocols were created to intercept school shooters before they act, but school officials can use assessments to intervene whenever they suspect a student may harm someone.
In his book on the method, Van Dreal is critical of approaches that increase fear or use a heavy hand. His approach aims not to be punitive but to provide assistance to children who need help.
The method, Van Dreal wrote, “operates without the use of labels, myths, profiling and overreaction.”
Under the Salem method, threats are evaluated at a Level One stage by a school-based team that may include school police. If it is determined that parents would be constructive, they can be brought in during the process, the handbook says.
The handbook outlining the Salem method that Parkrose uses advises that aggression exists on a continuum, from a low end of “scratch, bite, hit” up to “rape, strangle, stab, shoot, bomb, kill.”
If school professionals remain unsure at Level One, the protocol goes to Level Two. A broader team completes a second analysis. In Sanders’ case, that included representatives from local police agencies, the county mental health office, a child welfare agency and the county developmental disabilities office.
Proponents of threat assessments say they’re more effective than security measures that make a school feel like a prison. But their impact on students assessed as threats, rather than their value to the school as a whole, is rarely considered.
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Mark checks his phone while he pets the family dog.
Mark began to fill a folder with documents. He printed out all emails about the assessment. He read the threat assessment handbook. He kept a timeline.
His wife, meanwhile, was furious. Elaine agreed Mark’s calm and trusting way might be a better approach than her mama bear instincts. Still, she was flabbergasted that Mark had let the police into their house without a warrant, a move that she felt only ended up making the school more paranoid about their son.
School officials had told Mark the police report described a house with 30 knives. Did the report explain that more than a dozen were pocket knives that Sanders’ grandfather had given him? Were they counting the pirate swords, one for each of them, that had been part of their yearly tradition of dressing up for a pirate festival? Were they being judged just for being gun owners? Most of the firearms were antique, handed down from family in Colorado and Oklahoma.
What really prompted the continued scrutiny of Sanders?
Portland Police, after 23 days, denied Mark’s request to see the police report. Oregon law, he was told, says no member of the public can view a police report about a minor, even if that minor is a parent’s own child.
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Mark goes to a police station to pick up his guns. He agreed to give them to an officer for safekeeping while his son was assessed by the school.
The experience had shaken Mark, who one night told his son, “All your life I have told you to trust the police and you have followed that. But I can’t tell you that in regard to the (school police.)”
Sanders listened and threw biscuits to his dog. Elaine told him the less he said to school police, the better.
Elaine herself had been a teacher for seven years in public and private schools before changing professions. She vividly recalled the one or two kids she tried to never be alone with because they made her skin crawl.
“I think that if people trust their instincts they are a lot better off than going on witch hunts,” Elaine said to Mark one night.
“We don’t know,” Mark countered. “If you had that feeling, it could be that some of them have that feeling about Sanders. That’s what we have to find out.”
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Mark and Sanders talk over dinner one evening.
Mark wanted another opinion and so the couple invited their longtime friend Stephanie over for dinner. Stephanie’s older son had been a mentor to Sanders in Boy Scouts and she also had a child on the spectrum. More importantly, Stephanie was an educator. She taught Sanders how to read and later was his principal at a private school in the area.
Stephanie’s eyes grew wide as Mark and Elaine unfolded details over meatloaf and potatoes.
“Everything we did in those first few years to lift that boy up has just been ripped apart,” she said. “Where is the evidence? What you’ve shown me, there is no evidence.”
The trouble, Stephanie said, is the “sue-happy society.” Everything now, she said, is about liability.
“They have to protect themselves, so realistically what they are doing is not answering your questions,” she said. “They are not going to tell you what they think because what they’ve said has been said in confidentiality within a system they’ve decided works.”
After Stephanie left, Sanders wandered into the living room.
“If the situation is resolved, do you think you’ll be able to trust the school again?” Mark asked him.
“That depends,” Sanders said.
“On what?”
“Whether or not I get an apology.”
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Sanders shows his mom how to play a video game on the computer, a bonding activity suggested by his psychologist.
Mark pushed for another meeting with school officials. Afterward, he gathered his family at the dining room table. They sat framed by an archway adorned with a sign that read, “All Because Two People Fell in Love.”
The principal, Mark said, had given him more clues about what got Sanders on the administration’s radar: his talk about guns.
Mark said he told the principal that his son’s frequent remarks on that topic didn’t surprise him. His son hardly spoke of anything but video games.
“That is everybody’s conversation,” Sanders complained. “If they are a guy, that is most likely what they are talking about.”
Regardless, Mark told him, it would be good to practice discussions on other topics, “so that you don’t get thought of as the kid who talks about video games and shooting all the time.”
Sanders folded his arms and buried his head in the crook of his elbow. Nothing, he said, seemed to be getting better.
“You can go through life looking at the dark side or you can go through life looking at the bright side,” Mark said.
“I tried being optimistic about this, Dad,” Sanders said. “It failed.”
“It is not over yet,” Mark cautioned. “Sometimes, as you have seen in the movies, the good guy loses and loses and loses and loses but in the end he wins — and he wins by continuing to be a good guy. Don’t give up yet.”
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Sanders helps his mom play a video game and instructs her with enthusiasm, "Don't die!"
But Sanders couldn’t shake his unease. Reminders that he was under a microscope were everywhere.
Students around the country, including at Parkrose High, planned a walkout to protest gun violence. His parents asked if he wanted to participate. Sanders said no. What he wanted, he said, was to not think about it.
When could he go back to feeling normal? Why, he wanted to know, was he still viewed by his school as suspect?
Mark wondered, too. He confessed to his son that he had a tiny fear that school officials knew something he didn’t, maybe something Sanders forgot to tell him. Mark had a hard time believing the school would put his son through this much scrutiny with so little evidence.
Sanders’ anxiety mounted. He called his mom on his walk home from school one day and told her he felt certain a silver car had been following him.
She told him next time he saw the car to photograph it and call the police. Sanders told her he was worried the person following him was the police.
Then the bloody noses started. He got a rash of them. And he stopped going to school almost completely.
Mark had seen Sanders angry, but this was something he hadn’t seen before.
One April morning he peered into his son’s room, the waste basket filled with blood-soaked tissues, his only child a despondent lump in a bed he’d barely left the last few days.
Mark went for a walk to clear his head.
When he returned, he went straight to Sanders’ room and told him to get in the car.
They were going to Parkrose High.
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Parkrose High, which is decorated with a mural of gun-toting cowboys from the Wild West.
Mark went to the vice principal prepared to argue. The school needed to understand how scared he and his wife were. They had never seen their son like this.
“Sanders has told you he just wants the damn thing to go away!” Mark told the Vice Principal Drake Shelton, according to records the family kept of the meeting.
“And it is!” Shelton said. “Tell me, what is keeping it going?”
“You haven’t said anywhere he is no longer subject to this surveillance and these searches,” Mark said.
“Sanders, you are not in any trouble,” said Shelton, according to Mark’s records. “We know that this sucks and we hate that we had to go through it — but we had to go through the process.”
Shelton pointed out Sanders had only been searched once, maybe twice. At any rate, the need for the searches, he said, was over. To their surprise, he said the school felt Sanders wasn’t a threat.
What, Shelton asked, did Sanders want?
What he wanted, Sanders said, was a way to get his grades back up after all the classes he’d missed.
Shelton brightened. He was glad they were now talking about academics, he said.
Parkrose, he explained, offered night school.
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
The family's dining room.
Later that day, in the car on the way to their regular appointment with a psychologist, Mark tried to gauge how Sanders felt. The promise of smaller classes and more concentrated learning time at night school seemed to appeal to him. Still, it meant his son could no longer take part in theater, which he loved. Mark felt uneasy about less instructional time, just two hours a day.
In the backseat, Sanders stared at a paper the school had given him. As a junior about to be a senior, he’d been asked to describe what he wanted his future to be.
“So have you decided what you want to do with the rest of your life?” Mark asked.
Sanders didn’t answer. Instead, he wrapped his coat tighter around himself and rested his head against the window. Outside, it rained.
As it would turn out, the school district did not, in fact, consider the need for searches over.
However, there had been a change. The district planned to redo the assessment. Mark and Sanders both felt so tired.
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Sanders plays a video game in his room.
The week Sanders’ parents finally met with Parkrose Superintendent Karen Gray was the 19th anniversary of Columbine, a fact Gray made sure to emphasize in their meeting.
“The trench coat,” Gray stressed to them, “has become synonymous with terrorists in America.”
“If you drew a picture of a terrorist kid, that’s what they are wearing,” said Gray, according to records the family kept of the meeting. “The Columbine kids all wore trench coats.”
Markle, the student services director, was in this meeting, too.
Surely, she and Gray said, Mark and Elaine understood where the district was coming from. What Sanders viewed as “penalties” were merely safety precautions and they worked for his benefit.
Each time he was searched and they found nothing, that was solid evidence in his favor, Markle said.
“He hasn’t done anything wrong,” Markle said. “But the behavior that was concerning to people was that he would tell teachers to get off his back and leave him alone, that he would call students and staff ‘dumb as rocks’ to their faces.”
Mark wanted to know how they could justify this scrutiny when the handbook called for assessing only students who’d made specific threats to harm people. Sanders hadn’t threatened anyone.
What had fanned concerns after the initial reports about Sanders, Markle said gingerly, were Mark’s actions.
“Saying, ‘My son is really distraught, if anything happens now it is on you guys,’ saying stuff like that is what was making the school team nervous,” Markle said.
Mark said he understood. But he defended his comments. School officials, he said, had needed to consider how this process had upset his son.
After the meeting, Gray wrote the family a letter. By that time, they’d learned the new assessment had found Sanders did not require searches or surveillance.
“The threat assessment system comes to Parkrose from a high-quality source that is now considered the ‘gold standard’ in Oregon,” Gray wrote. “The district must protect itself against danger.”
Beth Nakamura | The Oregonian/OregonLive
Mark carries the family guns out of a police station. He agreed to give up the weapons while his son was being assessed by his school as a potential threat.
One May day, some 10 weeks after Parkrose School District pegged Sanders as a potential threat, a copy of the elusive police report arrived in the family’s mailbox. The juvenile court system, not police, released it.
It was a big victory. The family had felt in the dark for so long. Now they would finally see the police report they’d been told had been so pivotal.
The family gathered in the living room. Sanders sat burrowed under a blanket in his highlighter yellow Parkrose High T-shirt. He listened as his mother read the report aloud.
The officer’s report struck them as brief and bland, not the indictment they’d been primed for. So many school officials had stressed to them that law enforcement felt their house was unsafe. But all this really said was that the officer had been asked by the school to check if the home had guns and the answer to that question was yes. The officer found the family owned guns, and when he’d asked for permission to hold onto them while this played out, Mark had agreed. His report noted Sanders liked swords and knives. The house had about 20 of them. Sanders had made some of them as a hobby, it said.
Elaine flipped to the second police report, written by the school resource officer.
There, to the family’s shock, sat unredacted the name of the student who had caused the school to be alarmed about Sanders.
The student “was having a conversation with friends in the library about the recent school shootings nationwide,” and noted one student made him uncomfortable because he went by the nickname “Shooter,” the report said. A librarian overheard the conversation and reported it.
In brackets next to those comments was Sanders’ name. The brackets, Elaine said, suggested that maybe this teen hadn’t even named her son. The report didn’t note whether anyone had ever interviewed the teen who’d been overheard.
“The same day,” Elaine read on, “the school administration received an email from two concerned community members regarding Sanders. The email stated that in light of the recent school shooting, they were concerned with Sanders and his fascination with weapons and violence. In addition, his absence of friends and isolation also caused them concern.”
The report went on to say that Sanders had an “obvious” fascination with weapons and appeared to lack the healthy friendships expected of a boy his age. This, Mark and Elaine felt, was further evidence their son was being punished for who he is, a child on the autism spectrum.
Elaine continued reading: “However, he does not seem to be harboring resentment or fierce anger toward the school. He also denied wanting to harm himself or others. It is my recommendation that Sanders go to Level Two threat assessment so more support can possibly be allocated to him.”
The three of them stared at each other as the word “support” hung in the air. Sanders was stunned. They had, he said, clearly not shown him any support.
“Random searches are not support,” Elaine agreed.
Elaine asked Sanders if he knew the teen who made the comment. At one point, she remembered, he wanted to punch the person.
To Mark and Elaine’s surprise, their son didn’t seem upset by the name. In fact, Sanders was laughing.
“He’s a nice kid,” Sanders said. “I already predicted it would be (him). Seriously I predicted it a couple of days ago. I had a conversation with him and I figured it out myself.”
“Why would he call you Shooter?” Elaine asked.
“I don’t think he actually said that,” Sanders said. “I think he was talking about somebody else.”
His parents had seen the kid in one of the school plays, Sanders said. He’d been great in it, Sanders said, so they should remember him.
Sanders asked if he could go to his room and get on his computer to tell his online gaming friends about the police report.
Sanders laces up his boots one morning.
The Oregonian/OregonLive tracked down the student who was overheard in the library. At the first mention of Sanders, the student said, “He’s a great guy!”
The student was stunned to learn someone had reported something he said. He didn’t remember the library conversation. No one, he said, had ever asked him about it.
The name Shooter, he said, was a cruel label other kids put on Sanders because they thought he was weird and didn’t really know him.
“I think it is total stereotype and I think it is horrible,” the student said. “I never ever want to associate him with that.”
He said he knew Sanders as someone who is kind and strong enough in the face of social pressures to have his own interests. Sanders, he said, knows a ton about WW II planes, a history the student said he had been fascinated to hear.
“I had no idea because one day he was just gone. That really sucks. I feel really, really bad,” the student said. “I thought I could trust Parkrose.”
The night the family read the police report, Mark and Elaine puzzled over what all of this meant for their family. Their son had been in night school for weeks and it hadn’t been what they’d hoped. It felt to them less like teaching and more like babysitting.
“Comes down to it, he’s dropped out,” Mark said. “Would you say that’s accurate?”
“Pretty much,” Elaine agreed. “Since they started the assessment, yes.”
“They’ve effectively,” Mark said, “created a dropout.”
--Bethany Barnes
Email Bethany: bbarnes@oregonian.com
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