Tragedy renews their dedication to students

March 11, 2001

There was a puddle on the floor where condensation from her morning iced tea dripped for two days. Nearby, a breakfast roll had grown stale.

For an instant, nothing had happened. Michele Farres was back in her office, a physical education teacher about to start work.

But grief and reality hit the teacher hard as she stepped into her office in the Santana High School gym for the first time since Monday.

That was the day violence turned the campus upside down, when an undersized 15-year-old freshman shot up the school with 30 rounds from a revolver. Two students were mortally wounded. Eleven others, a security guard and a student teacher were injured.

"Coming back here, my iced tea, my purse -- everything was how I left it," Farres said, returning to her office two days removed from the ordeal. "But things had changed so much.

"Our lives would never be the same."

From classroom novices to seasoned veterans, shaken teachers have gone back to Santana High more determined than ever to wrestle triumph from the fear and violence of early last week.

Based on interviews with more than a dozen faculty members, teachers remain dedicated to their profession and feel a renewed commitment to students as a result of the nation's worst campus shooting since Columbine.

English teacher Angela Smith brought "No Fear" T-shirts for her colleagues so students would know their teachers are unafraid. Others promised there would be no lessening of academic standards.

"A little relaxation is really only for a few days," journalism teacher Karen Barnett said. "There's not going to be any letting up for the rest of the year."

Although teachers said they would feel safer with stepped-up security on campus, most said what the school needs more are extra counselors and smaller classes.

And if they could drive one point home to parents, it would be the absolute need for people to spend time with their children, to talk to them and to closely watch their behavior.

"Even though I usually have a class of 45, I'm going to make an even greater effort to know every kid -- observe them individually," said John Bobof, a PE instructor and girls softball coach.

Though more and more importance is placed on test scores, higher academic standards and tough college-entrance requirements, teachers say schools must not fail to embrace the human side of public education.

"What we are doing now is passing widgets through a machine," economics teacher Doug Coffin said. "A school isn't a factory. It's a little society, and right now, too many kids don't feel a part of it."

'On autopilot'

Algebra teacher Eleanor Blais had trouble sleeping, overcome with recurring thoughts of the small boy with a long-barreled gun.

Yet, like most of her 85 or so colleagues, Blais was back in front of her students by midweek, adamant that no measure of worry or grief or fear would prevent her from doing her job.

"It just makes you realize how needed teachers are," she said. "I've always known it. I just realized (last) week just how important and what good people teachers are. There are a lot of heroic teachers out there."

Farres described a heaviness hanging over the campus when classes first resumed.

"My heart hurt and my gut hurt," she said. "We were on auto-pilot."

For some of the teachers caught dodging bullets, the emotional wounds have taken days to open.

Tim Barry, who teaches geography and coaches basketball, said he felt secure after the attack. But that changed abruptly by mid-week. He and his family are only now coming to grips with the tragedy.

"Wednesday night my wife, Stacy, woke up screaming," he said. "That scared me more than anything."

Humor returns

Even tough, hard-bitten kids openly hugged their mothers and fathers. The irony was not lost on David Ellertson, a social sciences teacher who said the shooting has brought families closer together.

"When we were talking about the accident, most of the kids said, 'Hey, I like the attention I'm getting from my parents,' " he said. " 'We're talking, we're playing games together.' They like it.

"One girl said, 'Is this going to end? I like being the attention-getter.' "

For Ellertson, there was uncertainty as he approached his first class following the assault. Could he interest students in world history just days after they watched classmates run wildly from bullets?

He reached back to his trusty ally, humor.

"I was in a shock mode, up until today," he said Thursday. "I'm noted for a dry sense of humor, and while I was teaching today, I got my humor back. That helps. I'm starting the healing process."

To be sure, the gunfire affected people in different ways.

Gunshot victim Tim Estes, a student teacher with just three weeks on the job, is healing physically. He said the attack has given him a new sense of dedication to his chosen profession.

"It hasn't changed anything," said Estes, who was shot in the side of his belly. "It's a really horrible thing that happened. But it could have happened in a restaurant or 7-Eleven or any place."

'Leave it to Beaver'

"Unfortunately, violence is an everyday part of our society," said Jerry Henson, the varsity baseball head coach, who also works as a campus supervisor. "Stabbings, shootings, drugs and murders are things you see on the news every night."

There is debate among teachers about how much high school life has changed during the past generation or two.

Some instructors believe that the public-school experience is virtually the same as it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Others say 21st-century pressures -- drugs, gangs, stiff competition to get into college -- make it harder today to be a teen-ager.

"I grew up in a 'Leave It to Beaver' atmosphere and a lot of the kids I teach still do," said Wade Vickery, who has taught high school algebra for two dozen years and is the girls basketball coach.

"But there are a lot of kids out there who are on their own today. They don't have two parents to come home to."

Need for structure

The senior Williams sold his Maryland home in 1999 and moved with his son to a remote patch of San Bernardino County, where the boy's grandparents live. The scrawny teen-ager made some friends and stayed out of trouble.

But when Charles Jeffrey Williams moved to Santee last summer to take a job as a lab technician at the Naval Medical Center at Balboa Park, his son found it difficult adjusting to San Diego County.

Friends say the boy was picked on, made fun of by bigger kids.

He kept in close touch with his Maryland buddies and pledged to return there soon, but in the meantime, he adopted a suspect crew of acquaintances and turned to drugs and alcohol.

Such teen-age trauma, however, elicits little sympathy from several Santana High teachers.

"I don't buy into the outcast routine that everybody is portraying," said Rod Bowen, a water polo coach at the Santee campus who has spent much of the past week talking to people about what happened Monday.

"Parents I've talked to have said some interesting things about him, more like off-the-record comments, along the lines of they wouldn't let their kids play with him because he hung around the wrong kind of crowd."

By most accounts, Williams spent much of his time away from the modest two-bedroom apartment he shared with his father on Magnolia Avenue. Geography teacher Don Bainum thinks that sort of home life does not help.

"These kids need grounding, they need a place to be, not only at school but at home," Bainum said. "They need to be told, 'No, you can't go there. You have to do your homework,' or, 'You have to pick up the dog-poop in the front yard.'

"They need structure and they need somebody to talk to them."

A permanent memorial

The shootings at Columbine High School outside Denver, in which two students fatally shot 12 students and a teacher and wounded 23 people before killing themselves, occurred just weeks before the end of the school year. Santana's students have three months to mingle together.

"It's kind of like getting back on the horse after you get bucked off," said Ellertson, who gave Williams a B in geography last semester. "I think a lot more attention is going to be focused on the kids.

"I'm listening to my kids more. As parents, spend more time with the kids. I know I am."

The shooting has prompted new feelings about the campus. Like several others, Ellertson said he can never again walk across the school without remembering March 5, 2001.

"It's kind of like a memorial for me now," he said. "I see the flowers where Randy Gordon passed away, and things I saw in that bathroom will be forever etched in my mind."