Some MN Schools Use Classroom Play To Reduce Gun Violence, Bullying
Some MN Schools Use Classroom Play To Reduce Gun Violence, Bullying
MINNEAPOLIS — In the days after he murdered two of his classmates in Cold Spring, Minnesota, 15-year-old Jason McLaughlin cried with his old elementary principal, Jerry Sparby, and asked for a simple promise that has driven the educator’s work in the nearly 20 years since.
“I sat there with Jason across the table, both of us sitting there crying,” Sparby recalled of the conversations in the Stearns County Jail. “He had no idea he was doing the shooting until after he had done it. One of the things he asked to do was, ‘try to make sure other people don’t do what I did.’ ”
Sparby, now 74 and living in Minneapolis, realized there wasn’t much he could do within the limits of public education to keep his promise. The response too was often limited to more active shooter trainings, more lockdowns and more drills that inevitably compounded the fear and trauma kids were already dealing with, he said, as if more gun violence in schools is a foregone conclusion.
Indeed, America’s shameful history of school shootings — some 349,000 children have experienced gun violence since the Columbine massacre in 1999, according to a Washington Post analysis — offers compelling evidence that it is.
With 37 years as a teacher and principal behind him, Sparby went back to school and got a counseling degree. Rather than focusing not on what to do to prepare all kids for school violence, he wanted to get at the root causes by counseling those who have shot someone or who were thinking about shooting someone.
Kids like Jason.
Twenty years after a shooting, and Sparby still refers to John Jason McLaughlin, inmate No. 218041, a lifer at Minnesota’s maximum-security prison in Stillwood, with the same warm familiarity he did when Jason was a little kid.
‘The Invisibles’
Jason’s parents had asked Sparby to visit their son in jail to help them all come to grips with the Rocori High School shooting on Sept. 24, 2003. No one in the pastoral Minnesota town, small enough that everyone seems to know everyone by first name — and if they don’t, they know someone who does — had seen it coming.
That’s something people say in the face of tragedy, Sparby said, and indeed, it would seem only logical that any kid who could calmly pull a .22-caliber pistol he had swiped from his dad on two of his classmates and kill them would have displayed some behavior to suggest his life was out of control.
Jason didn’t.
“He seemed to be OK in the classroom,” Sparby said. “I had been with him many times. I saw him on the playground every day. I didn’t see him as one who didn’t have friends.”
What Sparby didn’t see, what he’d missed, was that the elementary playground had been Jason’s escape, a place to blend in and hide the fact that he had no friends. Jason was the “invisible” kid.
“There are dozens of kids like that,” Sparby said. “I just didn’t see them.”
A program and app he developed to counter that, HuddLUp, is backed by tomes of science and research about teenage depression, anxiety and other mental health issues, pronounced more than ever after the isolation of the pandemic.
But it is simple at its core, focusing on the basics of physical presence, touch and breathing as the foundations for a healthy mind, concepts that are extended in dozens of games that range from casual to more competitive.
Greg Spanier, a fourth-grade teacher at Cold Spring Elementary School and also one of Jason’s former teachers, uses HuddLUp in his classroom.
“Here’s what we’re lacking in a lot of our society, playing organized games together,” Spanier said. “It is so simple. The focus is really on playing and being in sync, having empathy for each other. We do a lot of talking about ‘after the game’ — how did that feel? Did anyone notice anyone sitting out, someone who wasn’t participating? Those things help us engage everyone.”
The results are difficult to calculate.
“The kids feel good; we know that immediately,” Spanier said. “We know they enjoy it. We know they are trying games outside their time in the classroom, at recess, and it’s having lasting effects.
“It’s fun. It’s truly fun,” he continued. “When people laugh together, take time every day to laugh and have fun, how can you argue that is not good for mental health? Smiling, laughing is taking care of someone’s mental health at some level.”
Talk Without Action
HuddLUp may not be a silver bullet on its own, Spanier acknowledged, but neither were the antibullying programs and others put in place in the Rocori school district after the shooting.
“Our school district used canned curriculum meant to teach character education, but I don’t feel like it did it for us,” he said, explaining that integrity and trust, the pillars of character education, were just words on a paper.
“It didn’t really engage kids, and maybe we didn’t totally invest ourselves in it,” he said. “When you are real with people — and I think you are when you’re having fun together — and conversations about how someone is feeling, that’s a way to do [character education] on a different level.”
HuddLUp has around a thousand games for kids, parents and teachers. The program is designed to serve students in kindergarten through 12th grade, but the current focus is on K-6 because of staff shortages. HuddLUp staff travel between about 90 classrooms in Minnesota, and its mobile app and YouTube channel offer virtual participation opportunities. There is no charge to the schools that use it.
Kids take the approach home with them, and that helps parents get in closer touch with their children, Sparby said.
“So many parents have forgotten how to play with their kids,” he said. “I’ve had parents say, ‘The only game I know how to play with my kids is Candyland.’ ”
To be clear, social isolation and outright bullying aren’t a factor in every school shooting, and certainly not every student who feels “invisible” turns out to be a shooter. But Sparby said he has counseled enough of these kids to know that kids thrive when they feel included, valued and seen, and what can happen if they lack the skills to reset their emotions.
“Nobody talked to them, touched them or even acknowledged them,” he said. “It was the same profile time after time. The symptoms are often the same as PTSD. If through play and integration we could eliminate that, that is something we should do.”
Author - Beth Dalbey, Patch Staff