The following transcript was generated using automated transcription software for the accessibility and convenience of our audience. While we strive for accuracy, the automated process may introduce errors, omissions, or misinterpretations. This transcript is intended as a helpful companion to the original audio and should not be considered a verbatim record. For the most accurate representation, please refer to the audio recording.
Michael Dunne: I’m Michael Dunne. Sometimes in this job I have, there are stories that I want to do, and there are stories that I have to do. Now, don’t get me wrong: Any excuse I have to go to Bend is one I’ll always take. But last week was the first time I’ve ever traveled to Bend and didn’t really want to go. No, it wasn’t a journey I wanted to take, but one I felt I had to take. The reason: I was going to talk with key leaders and observers in the community about the unspeakable tragedy of the Oct. 15 shooting at Silver Rail Elementary. Today is part one of a two-part series about how Bend is recovering from what can only be described as a nightmare, and on today’s show, you’ll hear from the city’s mayor and the school district superintendent about how it’s going. Today, I’m outside the front entrance of Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend. Just a couple of weeks ago, I’d never heard of this school. Just a couple of weeks ago, this was just an ordinary school. Today, however, it’s a closed building and a grim reminder of what happened on Oct. 15, when a former student, really just a kid himself at 16, entered this school and shot multiple people, killing three students and a teacher. Today, I’m not here to give an update on this heinous crime or talk about security or America’s unique and sad gun culture. No, today I’m in town to talk with community leaders and helpers to find out how Bend is doing. The city joins a list that no community wants to be on, but that unfortunately keeps growing: the list of cities that have witnessed a mass shooting. So today, as many cities have had to do in the past, we talk to folks about recovering in the aftermath. First up, we talk with the city’s mayor, Melanie Kebler. Mayor, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us.
Melanie Kebler: Sure.
Dunne: So, gosh, from your perspective, how is the city doing after this tragedy?
Kebler: I think we’re still hurting. Especially the families and kids most directly impacted are still going through it. You know, their school is closed. Their kids are not in school right now, and everyone’s trying to process. Of course, it’s impacting people in different ways, but the rest of our community is still impacted as well.
Dunne: What are you and your team doing out in the community to be both a voice and a sounding board on how things are?
Kebler: I think it was really important in the immediate aftermath that we had the governor here immediately. We had our federal and state leaders alongside our local leaders, standing up together, standing with our community, coming to the vigil, speaking to people. I’ve given out a lot of hugs. I’ve told a lot of people we’re here to support our community, and we want people to let us know what they need. We’ve also been working very hard behind the scenes, especially with our county partners and all of our community partners, to provide the supports that people need. So that’s been the focus of the last couple of weeks: What community support is needed, and how do we get it out there for folks?
Dunne: You know, unfortunately, this is fairly common in America today, so I’m wondering. It’s sort of fortunate, unfortunate. I would imagine there are a lot of mayors around America you can reach out to for advice and counsel, or just as a sounding board, and of course, unfortunately, there are so many who can do that. Have other mayors reached out to you? Have you reached out to others to ask what they did in this situation?
Kebler: Yes. Almost immediately, I had other mayors and organizations of mayors reaching out to me. Other cities in Oregon and their mayors wanted to support us. We had people emailing the council, places like Sandy Hook Promise and other groups and other cities saying, “We’ve been through this. Let us tell you what we learned and how to deal with this.” As you said, it is good to have that support and that network of people who can help us. There are literally playbooks and guides on how to deal with mass violence and how to respond to it, but it is incredibly sad that those exist, because it speaks to how often this happens, and it’s really just unacceptable.
Dunne: What is a piece of advice you got? I imagine as a mayor, especially in today’s America, these are things you have to think about. Was there a piece of advice where you said, “Boy, that’s something maybe I wasn’t aware of or didn’t think about, and that’s helping me now”?
Kebler: Well, we have such a great team that was handling things, especially in the immediate 48 hours afterward. But a lot of the advice I got from other leaders was about how to deal with the national media descending on our city, people who have never been here before and don’t know anything about Bend except for this one event, and are really just looking to get their sound bites and then leave a couple of days later. Also, how to play that role of “chief of compassion,” which is what another mayor in a different state called it: how to play that role for your community, what it looks like to work with people who are in shock and grieving, and how to do that while keeping yourself healthy and whole as well.
Dunne: Mayors of small to midsize cities kind of have to morph into whatever the moment calls for. Talk about that. Talk about what you’ve had to do, maybe change or just adapt to the situation.
Kebler: I think one of the great things about being a mayor and being in local government is you’re very close to your constituents, and we’re very accessible to folks, so we can develop those relationships, or just be in community, living here and being in my city all the time. It’s an interesting situation to have a tragedy like this happen, because everyone on the council has a personal connection with someone who has a personal connection, right? We’re all very deeply embedded in the community. So I think you can play the role of, like I said, that person holding the grief and standing with the community. Your community also wants to see you act: What are you going to do to make things different? And then we still have all the day-to-day city issues that are not going away, that still affect people’s lives, right? So we need to listen to people and problem-solve on those. All those different things keep happening at the local level. But one thing that is great is that we can be with our people, and they know who we are, because we are such an accessible council that’s involved with our community, and we have all those community connections.
Dunne: Bend is sort of beloved by Oregon. It’s one of everyone’s favorite cities, and it has a great reputation for beauty and all sorts of wonderful things. But of course, as you mentioned earlier, national and international media have descended on the city. What has that been like? I know you’re not responsible for what they take away, but give some thoughts on when the spotlight is on a city for an issue you hope would never happen.
Kebler: It’s just unfortunate that this is when we get the national attention, because it’s the worst day. It’s the worst day we could have as a city, for our leaders, for our staff and for the families affected. On that worst day, I was over at a conference in Salem and got the call immediately. I’m driving back to Bend, trying to get updates from my city manager, and all these numbers are calling my phone. And I’m like, “Oh, that’s a New York number. I’m just not going to answer,” right? But that’s happening to me. That’s happening to other leaders who are trying to act in the moment. That’s happening to families and victims’ families. What was bothering me was just the amount of attention all of a sudden, and the push to get information out as soon as possible instead of waiting to make sure we had the right information. Our team did an excellent job, and our local media did an excellent job, saying, “Let’s get the right information so we’re not putting misinformation out there.” But it’s unfortunate, because I don’t want people to remember and think about Bend because of this event, right? We have so many other things we’ve been working on and making progress on, and so many other great things about our city. That’s what we want people to know about Bend. And I think one thing people can take away is seeing how this community stood up and came together and supported each other after this horrible, horrible thing. It’s a testament to what kind of community we are.
Dunne: Yeah. To that point, again in the unfortunate category, schools and cities sometimes get known for a tragedy. And obviously, the job of the mayor is to market the city both within the city boundaries and outside, in the state and throughout the nation. Maybe it’s too early right now, but thinking down the line, what are some ways you want to make sure that Bend isn’t defined by this tragedy?
Kebler: I think we spoke to a little bit of this when the council gave a joint statement last week at our meeting: Let’s be a city that’s remembered for how we came together, how we support each other and how we endured through an event like this. We leaned on the strengths of our community, our nonprofit partners, our local small businesses, every person who donated or checked in on a neighbor or wanted to help out a friend and showed up in support. That’s what we want people to think about when they think about Bend, and how we are going to recover and how we’re going to advocate for change. I think that’s another thing we want to gain a reputation for. We’ve been a city that’s been very progressive, especially around gun regulation and public safety, and we want to continue to do that.
Dunne: OK. Is there maybe a time in the future when you’ll be able to say, “I think we’re past this”? Maybe it’s a vibe, a feeling, or maybe it’s input you’re getting from other people, where you’ll say, “OK, this is the moment where that is now firmly in the rearview mirror.”
Kebler: My perspective on this is, I was in high school in the late ’90s, and if you look in the archives of the Bend Bulletin, there’s an interview with me as a high school student reacting to, I don’t know if it was Columbine or the Thurston shooting, where they were asking us our opinions about these things. That was decades ago, and this is still going on. So for me, there will not be that feeling until we have made a real change in this country, so that this does not happen at the rate it’s happening right now. Because what this shows is that this can happen in any community, and we need to make some changes, some serious changes. When those serious changes start to happen, then I will feel like we are moving forward. But until then, we’re going to be living this, and we’re going to be recovering from this for a long time. It is not a two-month recovery. There is a long-term recovery for our community after this, and that is what all the other cities have told us. So there may not really be a moment where we feel like we’re past it, but I’m hoping there will be a moment that feels like our country has turned a corner on this issue and has made a real change.
Dunne: She is Melanie Kebler, mayor of the city of Bend. Mayor, thank you so much for your time.
Kebler: Thank you.
Dunne: The Bend-La Pine School District offices are housed in a building that’s more than 100 years old. On this day, I walk through its corridors, thinking that this building has probably never seen a tragedy like the one that befell one of its schools on Oct. 15. I sat down with the current superintendent to see how the district is recovering. Dr. Steven Cook, superintendent of the Bend-La Pine School District, thank you so much for talking to us.
Steven Cook: Sure, of course, Michael. Glad to be here with you.
Dunne: And especially at this very difficult time. I’ll start with this: How are you and the staff doing?
Cook: As you can imagine, there’s a lot of pain in our community right now. There are a lot of questions in our community, and I think those matter, and those questions are the focal points of lots of conversations. So when we talk with staff, those are the things we’re spending our time on. As you know, we have 32 of our 33 schools back in session. We started that several days ago, and I think generally those staff are finding ways to get back to whatever routines existed. I think it’s going to be a new normal for those staff, those families and those students. We still have a way to go with our Silver Rail staff and our Silver Rail families, so we’ve got a lot of work to do still. But what I would tell you is clear is that this community is rallying around. This is a responsibility we have not just for the short term, but well into our future, and we’ll be talking about this event as a point of change in our community. I want us to see that as: How do we make that point of change have some level of positivity, some level of support and some level of continued mental health resources that are going to be accessible for all the people in this community who are being impacted by this, whatever their involvement has been?
Dunne: Unfortunately, in America, this has become an all-too-common occurrence, and I am wondering about your colleagues, other superintendents. Have they reached out? Because obviously, this is not the first school shooting. Unfortunately, it won’t be the last. There might be a storehouse of coping mechanisms or just information that you might have heard from other superintendents.
Cook: Yeah. Well, first, I would tell you that my colleagues in the state of Oregon have been tremendously supportive and have reached out and offered support, offered help. We’ve taken some up on that help. This is every superintendent’s worst nightmare, and there are people who have gone through this, unfortunately, who do have answers to things we are facing right now and will be facing in the future. So we are certainly tapping into that to the extent we can. There’s not a playbook for this, but there are certainly best practices and people who have gone through this who can provide us their insights. We most certainly welcome continuing those conversations as we move our entire community through this process. And like I said earlier, I don’t think this is something that even 12 months is going to mitigate. We’re going to be talking about this for many years to come.
Dunne: As I understand it, you have some forums coming up to talk with parents. Talk about that. What’s your hope, your goal for those types of events?
Cook: Yeah, there’s a want and a need, quite frankly, for us to engage with our community about what they want to share with us. Some families at Silver Rail have had a chance to give us feedback on things that are on their minds, and that’s been super helpful for us. We’re also going to have community engagement sessions, both with the Silver Rail families and with the greater community, to get a read on the community’s take right now on the things we want to impact, and to hear and listen to what they say. For the last week or so, we’ve been saying this isn’t our decision to make alone. Having our community engage with us on many of the decisions that could influence the direction of the district, for the immediate future and the long term, is really important feedback for us to start gathering now, and we’re hopeful those conversations will provide some of that feedback. Engaging in this manner is part of the healing process. How do we talk about and look into the areas where we have shared values, and the areas where we may not be in values alignment? Let’s have those conversations.
Dunne: OK, from the day it happened until now, talk about the collaboration with other agencies in the community: law enforcement, the political structure, health and human services, safety. Talk about some of the things you’ve seen the community coalesce around.
Cook: Yeah, so let’s start with law enforcement. We have a wonderful partnership with the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office and Bend PD. This was an event that happened in the city limits of Bend, so although that’s Bend PD’s jurisdiction, I think officers from all law enforcement agencies responded, and first responders and emergency responders came to support and try to help in any way, shape or form they could. Journey Church reached out and allowed us to use its facility for reunification services. Deschutes County Behavioral Health has provided lots of mental health resources for us. So many others have helped us step into this event and start to work on stabilizing our community and working toward recovery over time.
Dunne: Maybe, in general terms, you could talk about some of the conversations you’ve had with parents.
Cook: There are parents who are hurt. There are parents who are trying to figure out what’s next for them. There are parents who have experienced the most unimaginable loss you can consider, and our job has been to just try to be there and be available for them, and to provide support and comfort in any way we can. There are no right words. There are families who are not certain they want to go back to their school, whatever school they’ve been in within the district. There are families who want to ask lots of really important questions about mental health supports for students and about the special education services we provide, and folks who want to know how we’re going to work to make our schools even safer now that this event has happened. So many conversations with parents, so many conversations with community members.
Dunne: Unfortunately, sometime in the future, a superintendent is probably going to call you because they’re going to experience something like this. Is there something you’ve learned in the past two weeks? Not about tactics or anything like that, but about resiliency, about how your team and the community came together.
Cook: Boy, that’s a great question, Michael. There’s no way to understand or know how you as a superintendent are going to respond. There is no playbook for this. If I had a chance to offer any advice, it would be to listen, to be empathetic and to do the best you can to provide comfort. We have a lot of folks in the district who are doing a lot of service for our community and for our impacted community. Make sure you’re recognizing when people are doing that kind of work. And then make sure you are ready to engage in really tough conversations, and don’t try to provide answers right now, because now is not the time for answers. Folks need to hear that you’re there and you’re willing to listen and hear them out.
Dunne: Yeah. Dr. Cook, my last question is this: I know a recent survey seemed to show overwhelmingly that people in the community want the school to reopen, and I’m wondering, do you think part of that is this idea of reclaiming their school? Something terrible happened, but they don’t want it to define the name of the school and the building itself.
Cook: Yeah, I think there’s some of that. I think there are some folks who are still working through the processing. One of the things I would tell you about the survey is, while it was overwhelming that they want the school back, they’ve also given us a lot of feedback that there are things they still want to talk through. So I think it is a both/and. Yes, they want their school back. Yes, they want to rebrand that school as a place of learning and not just a place of tragedy. But there’s also a lot on their minds, and they’re sharing those things with us. They want to make sure we know and understand that they still have concerns, unanswered questions and more dialogue to have in this community.
Dunne: He is Dr. Steven Cook, superintendent of Bend-La Pine Schools. Thank you so much for talking with us.
Cook: Thanks, Michael. Appreciate the opportunity.
Dunne: That’s the show for today. All episodes of “Oregon on the Record” are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Tomorrow is part two of our series about Bend in the aftermath of the school shooting, and we’ll talk with local reporters and a trauma therapist about the incident itself and how things are going in the weeks after the tragedy. I’m Michael Dunne, host of “Oregon on the Record.” Thanks for listening.
