Outraged Oxford Parents Demand Answers After Deadly Shooting

Parents in Oxford, Michigan, addressed their local school board for the first time Tuesday night to express their outrage at Oxford High officials for not taking action to keep a school shooter from posing a threat to his classmates on November 30.  Several parents blamed the board for not having proper security measures in place in the first place.

The shooter, whose name has been withheld per Daily Wire policy on mass casualty incidents, allegedly used a firearm belonging to his father when he killed four students and injured seven others. The morning of the attack, school administrators had met with the boy’s parents and showed them disturbing notes found that day suggesting the boy was willing to do harm to himself and others. Previously, he had been caught searching for ammo on his phone.

Following the meeting, school officials gave the boy’s parents the option to pull him from class or leave him in school. The parents declined to take him home.

Tuesday night was the first time parents had the opportunity to address the school board since the shooting occurred, Fox News reported.

Parents were clearly emotional and angry at the officials and their inaction:

“The first failure on the school is trust. We don’t trust you anymore,” the first parent to speak told school board members during the meeting recorded by WDIV, a local NBC affiliate. “Because now we’ve had catastrophic failures [on] your watch.”

“Why didn’t you call the police when you knew there was a kid with a problem?” he asked, receiving applause from the audience. “…I think you all need to resign tonight.”

Another parent said parents were initially left in the dark when authorities began showing up at the school on Nov. 30.

“Are we talking about guns again or is this, like, a bomb threat, or what?” she said. “…In order for us, as parents, to be able to feel comfortable and trust the administration again, we need full transparency about everything, and I’m not talking about names, but I am talking about, you know, did these threats come from within our district? Did they come from outside?”

Fox News also reported that Oxford Superintendent Tim Thorne issued a statement saying that the school never believed the student was a threat to himself or others at any time during their interaction:

“On the morning of Nov. 30, a teacher observed concerning drawings and written statements that have been detailed in media reports, which the teacher reported to school counselors and the Dean of students,” Oxford Community Schools Superintendent Tim Thorne wrote in a letter sent to the Oxford High School community. “The student was immediately removed from the classroom and brought to the guidance counselor’s office where he claimed the drawing was part of a video game he was designing and informed counselors that he planned to pursue video game design as a career.”

“At no time did counselors believe the student might harm others based on his behavior, responses and demeanor, which appeared calm,” Throne added. “In addition, despite media reports, whether or not the gun was in his backpack has not been confirmed by law enforcement to our knowledge nor by our investigation at this time.”

The school’s approach “seems to be in line with the school’s ‘restorative’ policy which uses principles based on a controversial disciplinarian approach called ‘restorative justice’ that has been blamed for allowing other school shootings to happen,” as The Daily Wire previously reported. Restorative practices emphasize keeping troubled children in school and in counseling rather than expressing them or calling law enforcement to avoid the s0-called “school-to-prison pipeline.”

Survivors of the shooting have filed lawsuits seeking $100 million.

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