Lessons From A School Shooting Survivor

Missy shares her lessons about listening, empathy, forgiveness, laughter, optimism, and kindness with today's youth. These lessons have enabled her to live a life of love and peace even after being a victim of the school shooting at Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky.

This brief investigates school shootings and their impact on individual, community, and societal levels. It includes professional and personal perspectives from individuals directly involved in and impacted by school shootings. These novel perspectives will help inform best practices necessary to strengthen school safety measures, as well as prevention and response efforts. This brief will serve as helpful guide to mental health professionals, school administrators, psychology students and educators, law enforcement, and threat management and crisis response teams, aiding in better understanding of the many factors surrounding school shootings.

Missy was one of 8 students in a prayer group who were shot by Michael Carneal on Dec. 1, 1997, in the lobby of Heath High School in Paducah, KY. Three girls were killed. Missy, a 15yearold sophomore at the time was paralyzed from the chest down. But Missy didn't see her disability as an end. Just hours after the tragedy, she forgave Carneal and took back her life. In the next decade, with no malice and a focus on her physical and mental rehabilitation, Missy would graduate from Heath, earn a bachelor's degree in social work from Murray State University, become a counselor for troubled youth, get married and give birth to a healthy son. Missy, now 26, has received numerous honors over the years for her determination and courage.

"The result is an important and horrifyingly thick anthology of mass murders...Highly difficult to read in one sitting, but we must not look away." —Kirkus Reviews A harrowing collection of sixty narratives—covering over fifty years of shootings in America—written by those most directly affected by school shootings: the survivors. “If I Don’t Make It, I Love You,” a text sent from inside a war zone. A text meant for Stacy Crescitelli, whose 15-year-old daughter, Sarah, was hiding in a closet fearing for her life in Parkland, Florida, in February of 2018, while a gunman sprayed her school with bullets, killing her friends, teachers, and coaches. This scene has become too familiar. We see the images, the children with trauma on their faces leaving their school in ropes, connected to one another with hands on shoulders, shaking, crying, and screaming. We mourn the dead. We bury children. We demand change. But we are met with inaction. So, we move forward, sadder and more jaded. But what about those who cannot move on? These are their stories. If I Don’t Make It, I Love You collects more than sixty narratives from school shooting survivors, family members, and community leaders covering fifty years of shootings in America, from the 1966 UT-Austin Tower shooting through May 2018’s Santa Fe shooting. Through this collection, editors Amye Archer and Loren Kleinman offer a vital contribution to the surging national dialogue on gun reform by elevating the voices of those most directly affected by school shootings: the survivors.

School shootings are a tragic reality. And while they're not as common as they seem, they are still very real, and so is the fear, anxiety, and trauma that comes with them-even if you've never actually experienced one. This book will help grownups and kids better understand school shootings and encourage us to be prepared while reminding us that we should never let the fear of the what ifs take over our lives.

School shooting survivors recount the horrible events and the aftermath when everyone stops asking questions. Dídac's book gives a voice to the unspoken truth by his fellow students, teachers, and others affected by the tragedy of school shootings.

Different areas of inquiry have addressed the tragedy of school shootings and their deeply disruptive impacts upon school culture, classrooms, and student learning in this contemporary moment. Therefore, it is important to bring together interdisciplinary research on the long-term impacts of these events on students, teachers, and communities. In an age where arming classroom teachers is a serious policy initiative, there is a question of how a culture of fear manifests itself in those involved in school systems. There is a need to study these effects and implications in a time where violence and school shootings appear to have become more common than ever before. Hence, there is a need for diverse perspectives in this area of complex and urgent inquiry. Impact of School Shootings on Classroom Culture, Curriculum, and Learning explores the manifestations of the threat of school shootings and the aftermath of such tragic events through an interdisciplinary approach including but not limited to inquiries from educational psychology, sociology, educational philosophy, school leadership, and school culture with a view towards understanding the enduring and obscured effects of school shootings beyond the prevailing emphasis on facility safety and security. While chapters highlight topics such as resilience and recovery, school culture, sociology of schools, leadership and school regulation, and many more areas of interest, this book is ideal for educational leaders and administrators, classroom teachers, counselors, therapists, psychologists, school division trustees, law enforcement, policymakers, researchers, academicians, and students looking for the impacts and aftermath of school shootings on all aspects of education.