What Happened at CVPA

On October 24, 2022, a shooter entered Central Visual and Performing Arts High School in St. Louis, Missouri, killing two people and injuring several others before being stopped by law enforcement. The school community, including students, teachers, and staff, experienced a traumatic event that would affect them well beyond that day.

For those of us in school safety, events like this are part of the landscape we work in. That does not make them routine. Each incident involves real people in a specific community, and the response has to meet that community where it is. What works in the immediate aftermath of a shooting is different from what is needed a week later, and different again from what supports a school six months down the road.

How Joffe Supported the Campus

The Joffe team was in contact with local schools and community partners in the days following the shooting. Our role was not to arrive and take over but to be a resource to the people already doing the work, the administrators, counselors, and staff who knew their community best and were managing an enormous amount while also processing their own responses to the event.

Practical support in the immediate aftermath often looks like helping schools communicate clearly with families, reviewing reunification and dismissal protocols, and identifying gaps in the response that can be addressed before the next day of school. These are not glamorous tasks, but they matter. Families who receive clear, calm communication from their school in the hours after a crisis are better able to help their children process what happened.

Longer-term support involves helping schools think through what a return to normal looks like and what normal should look like going forward. That conversation includes physical security considerations but also staff support, student mental health resources, and how the school community makes meaning of what it experienced.

What This Experience Reinforced

Proximity matters. Schools that have existing relationships with safety consultants, mental health providers, and law enforcement before an incident occurs are in a substantially better position than those building those relationships in the immediate aftermath. The value of preparedness work is not visible until you need it, and then it is very visible.

Staff are often overlooked in post-incident support. The instinct in most schools is to prioritize students, which is appropriate, but adults in the building experienced the same event and often return to work sooner with less structured support. A response plan that includes explicit provisions for staff well-being is more complete than one that does not.

Documentation during the response, capturing what decisions were made and why, is something many schools underinvest in. That record becomes valuable when debriefing the response, updating protocols, and communicating with families and the broader community about how the school handled the situation.

Preparing Without Assuming the Worst

One thing we are careful about in this work is the difference between preparation and preoccupation. Schools that spend every faculty meeting talking about worst-case scenarios create a kind of ambient anxiety that works against the calm, connected environment students need to learn and grow. Preparation should make a school feel more capable, not more frightened.

The practical work of preparedness, reviewing reunification protocols, training staff on Standard Response Protocol, establishing relationships with local emergency responders, can be done in a way that is matter-of-fact and professional. It does not require dwelling on graphic scenarios or cataloging everything that could go wrong.

What happened in St. Louis is a reminder that these events occur in real schools with real communities, and that the work of preparation is ultimately about people. The more schools can do to build the relationships, skills, and systems that support their community before a crisis, the better positioned everyone will be when they need those things most.