Speak Up Against Gun Violence

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By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 4/1/2009 2:10:00 PM

After the near-fatal shooting of his brother Matthew on the Empire State Building in 1997, Daniel Gross founded PAX: Real Solutions to Gun Violence. The nonprofit organization, which has a national SPEAK UP hotline, gives young people a safe, anonymous way to report weapon-related threats in their schools. As the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre approaches on April 20, Gross hopes to reach those students who may not have been old enough to remember the events of that tragic day.

What’s PAX doing in association with the 10th anniversary of the Columbine shootings?
We want to make sure that the SPEAK UP program is part of the national dialogue. Not only should we be remembering the loss and the victims, we also want students to know that there are things they can do in the course of their everyday life, and in their school day, that may be able to prevent a tragedy like it from happening. We focus on the idea of speaking up if you know of a weapon-related threat.

So taking preemptive measures? 
We should remember that Columbine was part of a wave of school shootings about 10 years ago. And studies from the U.S. Department of Education and the United States Secret Service show in 81 percent of those school shootings, the attackers told other students about their plans beforehand, which meant that four out of five times, there were kids who knew what was going to happen before it happened and could have helped to prevent these tragedies if they had said something.

What should educators and students do if they think there’s a threat at their school?
The first thing we communicate is that you shouldn’t ever think it’s a joke. You should take any weapon-related threat that you might hear very seriously. And then we’ve created this national hotline, which is 1-866-SPEAKUP, for kids to be able to completely and anonymously report weapon-related threats. It’s been very successful. In seven years we’ve gotten over 30,000 calls, and we’re very confident that we’ve prevented hundreds of tragedies like Columbine from happening.

How do you know if the hotline has averted tragedy?
There are two ways that we’re able to get that sense pretty concretely. One is if we get a number of calls about a specific, single threat. And that’s happened. Another is when you follow up with law enforcement or a school and they say a weapon was confiscated or a threat was averted. The problem is it’s all confidential, and I am not able to give details, and in most cases we’re not given details. And sometimes it’s a little frustrating because if we could give details and more students knew, then we could demonstrate the success of something like this. But that’s just understandably not the way law enforcement and schools think about it.

How does the hotline work?
A call comes in and we ask about five minutes' worth of questions based on a rigorous protocol that we developed with experts in law enforcement and education to really determine the nature of the threat. And if they answer ‘Yes’ to this, we ask them this, and if they answer ‘No,’ we ask them something else. All the counselors are fully trained, and 70 percent of them have master’s degrees. It’s completely anonymous at all times and nothing is recorded. And then once the call is terminated, the hotline counselor first contacts the school, if there is a school involved. It was very important to the education community that they be contacted first in the event of a threat so they could handle it on the scene. The second call is placed to the most local law enforcement agency. They’re encouraged to get in touch with each other and we step out of the way.

Were there concerns that students would misuse the hotline and make prank calls?
It’s a concern adults have going into it, but it has not been a problem at all. We did our homework. We talked to kids for a year, we did focus groups, and we did studies. We asked kids why they would call, and why they would not. We asked what the barriers were and we realized at that point that kids knew where to draw the line. And we’ve literally had zero instances.

Do you support gun control?
No we don’t. We don’t get involved in the political debate at all. We’re not for it or against it. We want everybody, regardless of how they feel politically, to appreciate gun violence for the issue of health and safety that it is. Eight kids are killed every day in our country by guns, so the fact that it lingers on as a political debate while kids are dying is a tragedy in and of itself. We actually think that one of the big obstacles is that people perceive this as an issue about politics, while kids are dying.

Apart from the hotline, how do you work with schools, libraries, and other venues that reach kids?PAX is, at its core, an education and awareness campaign. We wouldn’t have any of the success with the hotline if students didn’t know about it, and didn’t feel it was trustworthy. So we get the word out through lesson plans, public service announcements, putting up posters in schools, distributing wallet cards, bracelets, and T-shirts to students. We’ll work with an individual schools and libraries, which can sign up to get a package of awareness materials so students can know about the hotline. We can also customize the hotline to provide or to set up specific contacts, if a call comes in from a certain school and they say we want this person to be the one we get in touch with in the event there’s a report from that school.

Are your services completely free?
Any student can call the hotline for free. Schools must pay to get materials or have their database customized, which is roughly $3,000 a school depending on the size, and then 75 percent of that ongoing. We’re also about to launch a text messaging capacity so students can text message reports. That’s going to be done on a school-by-school basis because for that we have to make sure we have the contacts exactly right.

How is your brother? 
Considering what happened to him he’s doing amazingly well. He was in a coma for a while, and we were told he wouldn’t survive. Physically he’s doing great. Cognitively, emotionally he’s still improving, still working hard, and he still faces a lot of challenges. And it’s impacted his life obviously deeply and it’s impacted the lives of everyone who loves him and cares for him. One of the great moments was on the one-year anniversary of his shooting, he came to what was the kind of public launch event for PAX, and he didn’t say much but his words were as deeply meaningful as words can be. And not only did he move everyone that was there, it’s been clear that it’s given him a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment to be a part of it. But even if he didn’t do any of that he’s obviously part of the heart and soul of what PAX is. It wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for him.