Creating a safe community: The transition project

In the wake of suburban school shootings, Westfield High School developed a program to reduce student isolation and promote belonging.

On November 30, 2021, an armed sophomore attending Oxford High School in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, walked through the halls of his school and began to “methodically and deliberately . . . aim a gun at students and fire [his] weapon . . . When students began to run away, [he] allegedly continued to go down the hallway at a ‘methodical pace’ and shot inside classrooms and at students who hadn’t escaped” (Elamroussi, 2021). This 10th grader ultimately murdered four fellow classmates and injured seven others. Since April 1999, when two armed seniors at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, murdered 12 fellow students and one teacher in what, at the time, was considered the most horrific school shooting in U.S. history, school shootings have become tragically commonplace throughout the United States. Not only have they launched ceaseless political debates about gun control and student safety, but they’ve called into question the trust many Americans had placed in the safety of suburban life.