Don’t let violence divide our community

Columbine, Parkland, Sandy Hook, Uvalde — the names of these places will almost certainly always bring to mind one of the worst forms of violence we can imagine, but they will also be remembered for how their communities responded when that violence took place.

Taos County residents have watched in recent years, along with so many other communities, as the specter of school violence has loomed ever larger. Mass shootings in schools, specifically, climbed to the highest rate in more than 20 years in 2021, according to a study by the National Center for Education Statistics. When a cross country runner was stabbed in the Taos High School parking lot on Monday (Sept. 19), we caught a glimpse into what other communities near and far have been through on a much larger scale — as well as a look at ourselves and how our community might react in the wake of such violence. It wasn’t perfect. Immediately, fingers were pointed, mostly at Taos Municipal Schools District, based on what we saw in the comments on social media. Some of the questions that arose were understandable: How did the individual accused in the stabbing gain access to school grounds? Where are the protocols to prevent something like this from happening? At the same time, we assume these questions were asked by people who maybe didn’t know at the time that the district has, for months now, been in the midst of implementing a state-of-the-art school security system, which is being funded by a federal grant very few other districts have been able to acquire. One of the people who responded to Monday’s incident was a new district security officer, Marcos Herrera, who worked with state police to secure the scene.

That the story about that laudable effort to make district students safer was to be our front page feature in this week’s paper before Monday’s incident is both coincidental and, at the same time, not. Like many of you, we have spent time in our newsroom discussing the possibility of school violence in Taos County and how we, as a newspaper,

would respond. We’re not superstitious, but when talking about the prospect of such a terrible event, we can’t help but knock on wood.

From having interviewed all of them this year about the topic, we know former Taos Municipal Schools Superintendent Dr. Lillian Torrez, her interim replacement, Valerie Trujillo, Taos Federation of School Employees President Francis Hahn and other district staff are also deeply concerned about preventing school violence, and long before Monday, they were taking steps to prevent it.

The second reaction we saw was from people hoping to use the incident as a chance to deepen the longstanding divide between “outsiders” and “locals.” There’s just no place for that here, and really not anywhere else either. If you live here and contribute to making Taos County a better place, it doesn’t matter where you’re from. If you live here and make it a worse place, it doesn’t matter where you’re from either.

We trust that our school administrators at Taos Municipal Schools, in our neighboring districts and in all of our private schools, will take Monday as a reminder to always make the safety of students their highest priority, and that if our community is ever faced with a similar situation — or worse — that its residents will support one another, rather than find ways to be divided.