I gathered my school materials together and prepared to return to my high school classroom after the Christmas holidays. At my school, Mother Guerin High School, it will be a very different experience for all of us because for the second time in two months a student of ours is dead, killed by a gun.
For the second time in two months we will have to be attentive not only to our administrative and teaching responsibilities, but also to the needs of our students and ourselves to grieve yet one more unnecessary death.
In the last two months we have experienced two very sad wakes and two funerals. Our administrators, faculty and staff continue to be as supportive as possible to the families and friends of our deceased students.
As a school community rooted in the Roman Catholic tradition, we believe in a God whose provident care surrounds us. But we face the very real fact that two young women from our community have died violent deaths by guns.
Not only do I grieve these deaths, but I am very angry that accessibility to guns has again been used supposedly to solve problems. Appropriate means for conflict resolution and elimination of guns are issues that must be dealt with in homes, in schools and in the larger society, or tragedies such as those experienced at Mother Guerin will become yet more and more a part of life.
