A student reported concern about suspect before Olathe shooting, superintendent says
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Olathe East High School shooting
A shooting at a Johnson County high school injured a school resource officer and an administrator, according to police. The suspect, a student, is in custody.
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An Olathe East High School student had concerns about Jaylon Elmore and told administration before Elmore was sent to the school office and allegedly exchanged gunfire with a resource officer, Superintendent Brent Yeager told The Star Wednesday.
Yeager gave his first interview since last Friday’s shooting that left Elmore, School Resource Officer Erik Clark and Assistant Principal Kaleb Stoppel injured. Elmore, an 18-year-old senior, has since been charged with attempted capital murder for allegedly shooting Clark. He remains hospitalized in critical condition. Clark and Stoppel were released from the hospital on Friday.
Yeager would not confirm whether the Olathe East student reported that Elmore had a gun. But other staff members and students have told The Star that was the case.
“There was a student who reported a concern, and we are so grateful for that. By a student sharing a concern is how we were able to intervene,” Yeager said. “We learn the most and are able to keep our students the most safe when our students, our staff and our community, if they see something, they say something.”
Many parents are questioning how the shooting could have occurred and whether more safety protocols and student interventions could have prevented it.
“As a parent of a student that goes to Olathe East I need to know what they are going to do to keep our children safe going forward,” said Nichole Miller, mother of a sophomore. “I cannot send my children back to this school district without reassurances that they are doing all they can to keep our children safe. There are kids that go to school for safety because they don’t get it at home. Now they do not have a safe place.”
The superintendent declined to answer questions about Elmore and what might have led to the incident, saying he would wait for the results of the police investigation. Many details remain unknown, including how Elmore obtained a gun, how and why he brought it to school, as well as what exactly transpired in the administrative office during the shooting.
Because Clark fired his service weapon, he has been placed on administrative leave while the county’s Officer Involved Shooting Investigation Team reviews the incident, police have said.
Yeager said that administration will do its own investigation and review its policies and procedures to determine whether changes are needed.
“From a very high-level standpoint, it looks like our preparedness and our crisis planning went well,” Yeager said. “We never want what happened on Friday to happen in any of our schools. But the outcome was far better than it could have been, which is something I’m very grateful for. The fact at this point that there’s no loss of life or anything like that is pretty remarkable.”
Safety at Olathe schools
Sarah Coddington was teaching a science class at Olathe East when she received an alert telling her to keep students inside the classroom, as a shooting unfolded in the administrative office.
As she focused on keeping students calm and safe, rumors immediately began to circulate. Students watched out classroom windows as more police officers arrived.
“Students have seen school shootings play out so many times (elsewhere), and they’ve seen the devastating consequences of the school shootings. So their brains immediately go to, ‘Is this going to be another case where we have 17 students dead? Is this going to be a case where we lose our teachers?’” Coddington said. “They have that experience of living in a world where this trauma happens and fearing it might happen to them. This traumatizes all of our students.”
Olathe Police said that Clark responded to the main office to assist with an administrative matter, then Elmore displayed a handgun that led to an exchange of gunfire. Students remained in lockdown for a few hours until it was safe for them to be reunited with their families.
The shooting that left the community reeling has sparked questions from many parents, who wonder whether tighter safety measures are needed in the district.
The Olathe East incident followed a school year shrouded by a rise in threats against Kansas City area schools. The Star has counted at least 20 school threats this school year. At Raytown South High School, for example, police found a loaded gun in a student’s car — the second incident where police were called to the campus to search a student for bringing a loaded gun.
Many Olathe parents have called on the school to install metal detectors, as some urban districts in the Kansas City metro have.
“How are these guns even making it past the entrance?” Miller said. “I do not care if metal detectors look uninviting. Going to children’s funerals is uninviting.”
Yeager said metal detectors at school entrances have been evaluated by administrators and by experts in the industry, and they are not currently part of the district’s safety plan.
There are mixed views and research on whether they help prevent school shootings. Metal detectors are expensive and require guards to man them. Many education experts argue they also can create a prison-like atmosphere, making students more likely to perceive violence than to feel safe.
The Olathe East suspect is accused of firing an untraceable “ghost gun,” an unregistered firearm that is often assembled from a kit or purchased in parts to avoid scrutiny. Such guns can be made of material that might elude metal detectors.
“My gut feeling is I don’t think metal detectors would help students feel more safe,” Coddington said. “I also can’t imagine logistically how that would work. We have 2,000 kids. We’re not going to go through one metal detector. Logistically, that would be complex.”
The district has security cameras and resource officers in its buildings, as well as entrances that require visitors to be screened before they are allowed to enter. The district uses the ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate) active shooter response protocol, which includes locking down buildings during unsafe situations and requires annual training with students and staff.
Days before the shooting, voters approved the school district’s request to issue $298.3 million in bonds. More than $8 million of that is expected to go toward safety improvements, such as adding more cameras in buildings.
“Our community has supported us through our last several bond referendums, in terms of having advanced safety and security measures in place in our schools. Some of them are things our community is widely aware of, and some of them are not. That is by design,” Yeager said. “We’ve been engaged with experts in school security for years and years in our district.”
Yeager said that administration will review its safety protocols.
“We will absolutely interface with experts in the field of school safety and security to see what enhancements and changes we need to make,” Yeager said. “It’s devastating that this happened in one of our schools. I do think our preparedness paid off in terms of the end result. But I’m certain there will be things we’ll learn from it.”
Some Kansas lawmakers are now calling for stricter gun laws — a push that has faced defeats in recent years as the Legislature has loosened restrictions on firearms.
The Kansas House K-12 Budget Committee on Tuesday added $5 million to the Kansas State Department of Education budget for safety and security grants — money that had been available starting in 2018 but was not included in last year’s budget.
If approved, the grants could be used for any new expenditures on safety, including school resource officers.
How to help students
The shooting also has left community members questioning how schools address student mental health and other concerns.
Like other Kansas districts, Olathe has been implementing more social-emotional learning in recent years, pairing students with more counseling services and teaching them lessons on managing emotions and conflicts.
“We’ve done a lot of strategic things over the last number of years to really focus on (social-emotional learning),” Yeager said. “So much of that is connections kids have with each other, connections kids have with staff members. And from a proactive, safety, security, emotional well-being standpoint, relationships are really the best possible thing there is.”
Yeager would not comment on whether there were any warning signs ahead of the shooting.
“I do think that any time something like this happens, we see that our children have unmet needs,” Coddington said. “When their needs are met, this doesn’t happen.”
Coddington said that some national and statewide political efforts — to stymie education on the history of race and social-emotional learning, for example — are making it more difficult for teachers to address the needs of every student. She said those lessons are especially critical for students of color, LGBTQ students and others who may experience bullying or feelings of isolation.
“We need social-emotional learning. We need to be able to discuss history in an honest fashion. We need to be able to refer students to resources that they need,” she said. “We need to have enough staff on hand that we can know students early enough in a school year and build relationships early enough that they trust us with learning their needs and let us help.”
Kansas Sen. Cindy Holscher, who has a child at Olathe East, has been pushing for tighter gun laws, but also said lawmakers need to listen to teachers to determine how to better support schools.
“We know that teachers are able to identify when there’s a situation or concern with a situation. But right now, our student-to-teacher ratios aren’t quite where they should be. And that makes it harder for teachers to establish relationships with all the kids in the class,” Holscher said. “If we really want to focus on this, we need smaller class sizes. We need less of a workload on our teachers and staff, as well as better pay. So many issues in our society get pushed to the schools.”
Includes reporting by The Star’s Katie Bernard.
This story was originally published March 9, 2022 at 1:15 PM.
