After Bend: the six years, the town, and a fuller answer than prevention
Paul Tan · Good Protocols, SPC · October 2026
On Thursday afternoon, October 15, a sixteen-year-old climbed a fence at Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Oregon, shot through a door, and entered the first classroom he came to. It was a special needs classroom just left of the entrance, and the people in it come first.
Rhoam Summer was five. His family said he was “an amazing child who was full of life.” Two boys, eight and eleven, were killed with him, and their families asked that their names be kept, so I keep them. Saylor Graham, seven, was shot and is in serious but stable condition. Megan Lambert, twenty-five, was a special education teacher in her first year with the district, and her family said, “Her call was to be an educator, and teach in the school district she loved.” Becky Drury, fifty-four, an inclusion educational assistant, was shot in the arm and the hand and is recovering, with more surgeries ahead. A learning specialist whose name has not been released threw her phone at him, tackled him, and fought him for the gun. A father with two daughters at the school ran toward the room and shot him.
Look at what kind of room this was, because everything I want to say hangs from it. A five-year-old and an eleven-year-old were in it together, with a teacher and an assistant who were the same adults every day, in a ratio small enough that the adults knew each child by his particulars and not by his file. In thirty years of work near rooms like this I have come to think it is the most held a child with a disability will ever be inside a public system. It is also, by design, a room that ends. Every child in it is being prepared to leave it.
The six years
The public conversation will run on three tracks: the gun, the shooter’s mind, and the school’s security. I have nothing to add on the first that others are not already saying. I will not go to the second, because nothing on the record licenses an account of a sixteen-year-old’s mind, and my sector has done enough harm by writing such accounts. The third will produce a protocol. What none of the three can see is the stretch of time the record barely holds.
In September 2020 the local station in Bend ran a story about a special education program reopening its classroom during the pandemic. The program is called the NEST, for Nurturing Empathy, Safety and Trust, and the regional education service district runs it with the Bend-La Pine schools for children in kindergarten through fifth grade with what the district calls intensive behavioral and social skill challenges. That fall it held ten children for two hours and forty-five minutes a day, at desks with plexiglass dividers. The teacher interviewed said something every parent and every program director should read twice: “If I don’t have a relationship with a kid, it doesn’t matter how many skills I have.” A mother interviewed for the same story said her ten-year-old had struggled to learn from home, that she was not trained to teach a child with special needs, and that she hoped the skilled teachers would get him the help he needed. The program’s own page states its purpose in one line: “to prepare them to transition back to the district.”
That ten-year-old is the sixteen-year-old who entered the classroom on Thursday. The police chief has said he was not enrolled in the district’s schools. In Oregon that does not mean he was not in school, since a sixteen-year-old can be in a private school, an online charter, or educated at home with notice to the education service district, and nothing public says which, or when he left, or who held him at twelve or fourteen. Six years, and the record holds one sentence about the end of them.
I am not going to fill those years, and I am asking the people who will write about this not to fill them either, because a filled gap is where the worst of my sector’s habits grows. What I can describe is the shape of those years for any child who leaves a room like the NEST. The room succeeds when the child leaves it. At eleven or twelve the home school is a middle school: six teachers instead of one, a case manager with a caseload, a resource room for part of the day, and a behavior plan that travels as a document rather than as a person. By fourteen the holding is a schedule. By sixteen a boy can be out of the district’s sight, and no instrument anyone is required to keep will know where he is. Every adult who held him at ten is replaced, in order, by a piece of paper, and each replacement is done correctly. Federal law names a cliff at eighteen to twenty-one, when the entitlement to special education ends, and it requires transition services in the IEP from the year a student turns sixteen. The earlier cliff, at the end of a self-contained elementary room, is named nowhere.
The table
The reflex of my sector, when a child does something terrible, is prevention, and prevention in practice means a table: a list of factors, a score, and a sorting of children by what they might do. I want to tell the history of that table, because I have lived in the neighborhoods it was built from, and because the same files that produced it eventually said something else.
In the 1940s two Harvard criminologists, Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, matched five hundred boys from the Massachusetts reform schools with five hundred boys from the same low-income Boston census tracts who had not been in trouble, one by one, on age, ethnicity, intelligence, and neighborhood. The boys were ten to seventeen, most of them about fourteen. Later accounts put them in South Boston, Charlestown, East Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, and the West End. I lived in Dorchester for two years as a young youth and family pastor, half a century after those boys grew up on its streets, and I can tell you that a three-decker on a Dorchester side street is a particular place and not a census tract.
The Gluecks wanted to spare boys the reform school by finding them early, and they built a prediction table out of five family factors: the father’s discipline, the mother’s supervision, the father’s affection, the mother’s affection, and the cohesiveness of the family. In 1952 the New York City Youth Board applied the table to 244 boys entering first grade in two Bronx schools and followed them for ten years, to find the delinquents at six. The table flagged more than a quarter of the boys. The Youth Board dropped two of the five factors along the way. In the end its accuracy beat the plain guess that no boy would become delinquent by about two percentage points. The caseworkers who sat with those mothers were earnest, and the Gluecks were earnest, and the table was still a way of looking at a six-year-old and asking which way he would go.
The 2026 version of the table is called threat assessment, and Oregon is where its best-known form was built. John Van Dreal began developing the Salem-Keizer model in 1999, after Columbine, and the state’s school safety assessment teams now follow it. To its credit, the model already knows what was wrong with the Gluecks’ table. Its handbook describes a team process that assesses the level of risk in a situation, as opposed to instruments that profile students by characteristics that might predict violence, and Van Dreal’s own summary of the work is this: “Moving kids from despair to hope - that’s the bumper sticker for what we do.” Hold on to that sentence, because the fuller answer I am proposing is what it would take to make it true for six years rather than for the weeks after a threat.
What the files said when someone kept reading them
The Gluecks’ files did not stay a table. Robert Sampson and John Laub found them in a basement at Harvard Law School, read the thousand boys again, published what they found in 1993, and then followed the five hundred delinquents to the age of seventy. What they found is the part my sector has never absorbed. Childhood did not sort the boys. In their words, “childhood prognoses account poorly for long-term trajectories of offending.” What sorted them were bonds: attachment to a family and a school in the adolescent years, and then, in adulthood, a marriage, steady work, the service, which Sampson and Laub called turning points, and which are relationships with a date on them.
The other half of the files went somewhere stranger. In the early 1970s the 456 Glueck boys who had never been in trouble, by then men in their forties, were folded into the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest study of adult lives ever run, and were followed into their nineties beside the Harvard sophomores recruited in 1938. Robert Waldinger, who directs the study now, says the finding that held in both groups, the sons of Dorchester and the sons of Harvard Yard, is that the quality of a man’s relationships predicted his health and his happiness in old age better than anything in his body or his file. The method tells you as much as the finding. The study did not send questionnaires; it sent people. “We interview them in their living rooms,” Waldinger says, and the Boston men kept asking, “Why do you keep wanting to study me? My life just isn’t that interesting.” For eighty years somebody kept coming to the kitchen, and the men whose lives went well were the ones who had someone besides the study who did the same.
So my sector’s own family history answers the question every reporter in Bend is asking. The Gluecks asked who would go wrong. Eighty years of the same files answered a different question, which is who kept coming.
Follett, a generation before
There is one more fold in this history. From 1900 to 1908 Mary Parker Follett worked out of the Roxbury Neighborhood House, where she founded a debating club for young men called the Highland Union, and from 1908 to 1920 she chaired the committee that opened Boston’s public school buildings in the evenings as neighborhood centers, beginning with East Boston High School in 1911. She did this work in the same districts the Gluecks would sample a generation later. I hold that only as a fact of geography, since no record connects any Glueck boy to anything she built. What she took from those years, before the business world discovered her in the 1920s, was the idea that a person becomes someone inside a group, and that a group’s work is never settled by one party giving orders to the other, because both of them take their orders from the situation they study together. The sector she came from set her aside, industry bought her ideas, and the study that would eventually prove her right began by counting the sons of her districts as a baseline for predicting which of them would go wrong.
Holding history this way, every party given full humanity and the outcome hidden from them at the time, is the only way I know to fold it into what we build next. The Gluecks were not villains. The Youth Board caseworkers were not villains. The threat assessment teams meeting in Oregon this week are not villains. They are one reflex at four dates, and the files they kept are what tell us the reflex was aimed at the wrong question.
Galashiels
Set beside Bend a town that answered the right question, with a six-year gap of its own.
John Davidson was born in Galashiels, a mill town in the Scottish Borders, in 1971. The tics began at about ten. For six years no doctor could name them, and the years were spent in and out of hospital, heavily medicated, while the school decided he was a discipline problem and the town decided he was the boy who swore. His father was a joiner, and he left. John has said the condition was something his parents’ marriage “just couldn’t survive.” He left school at sixteen with no qualifications. Every institution that met him saw the condition with complete clarity and did not see him. Those are the same six years as the boy in Bend, forty years earlier, with the same shape, and the comparison ends at the shape. Nothing in John’s life resembles what was done on Thursday.
What happened at sixteen did not happen in a program. He stood at the front door of his friend Murray’s mother, a mental health nurse named Dottie Achenbach who had just been given a cancer diagnosis and whose friends had gone awkward around her, and she asked him in for dinner. She said later that it was “the most honest anyone had been to me in weeks.” He came for tea, in her words, and stayed twenty-five years. Notice what the household did, because it was not elaborate and it was not clinical. It did not treat the tics. It told him to stop apologizing. It laughed with him instead of at him, and Dottie says he was frightened to laugh when he arrived and “learned the difference.” Dottie had the training, and the thing that held him was the part of her that did not need it.
Around 1990 the caretaker at the Langlee Community Centre, Tommy Trotter, gave him a job. Tommy was the building’s caretaker, and nothing in the record says he had any training for what he did. His method was to make sure the youth club knew about John’s condition before John walked in. He prepared the room rather than accommodating the man, and John has worked at that community centre for thirty-five years. The memoir is dedicated to Tommy.
The honest part belongs here. At nineteen, three years into the household, John struck a seventeen-year-old outside a disco because he believed the boy was laughing at him. He was tried and acquitted on a psychologist’s evidence. He has been beaten badly after a tic directed at a stranger, and arrested more than once by officers who heard a tic and wrote down defiance. The household did not prevent any of that. It held him through it, and he went home to it afterward, and the boy he struck wrote to him thirty-six years later, and they call what followed closure.
Then the direction reversed. In 2003 John started a support group for families in the Borders. He runs a residential camp every year where thirty people with Tourette’s can, as he puts it, feel part of “a like-minded tribe.” He gives workshops to schools and to police. When a twelve-year-old named Rory began ticcing in public, John walked into the Jedburgh police station with Rory and his parents to explain the boy before the boy became a public order matter. The first thing he taught the director who made a film about him was “ignore the tics but not the person.” And in February 2026, as a guest at the BAFTA awards for that film, a tic produced a racial slur while two Black actors were on stage, a national broadcaster aired it, and a government minister called it harmful. He went home, said that his tics “have absolutely nothing to do with what I think, feel or believe,” and kept going to the schools and the police stations. The man the town held became the man who prepares rooms for other people’s sons, including after his own worst nights.
Count the credentials in that story. There was one nurse, who mostly did not use hers. There was a caretaker, a sister who stayed, a mother who struggled and was let back in, and a town that learned slowly and is still learning. The holding was done almost entirely by people with no specialization at all, and the one specialist in it did her best work at a kitchen table.
A fuller answer than prevention
Here is what I would build, and it is not a prevention program. It is a town, started early, around the family, made mostly of people who are not specialists, that stays through the school changes and the cliffs, and that in time is taught by the person it held.
Start the town at the first room. The IEP is the one table where a family and a school already sit together, and federal law has never required anything at that table beyond services. Nothing in it requires a named adult to travel with a child from a self-contained room into a middle school, and the transition plan arrives at sixteen, five years after the earlier cliff. The team can do what the law does not require. It can invite the town to the first IEP meeting and not the last: the neighbor, the coach, the pastor, the woman who runs the garden, the man who will one day give the kid a job. It can write a person into the plan beside the services, one adult whose role is to still be the child’s adult at twelve, with a weekly hour and the parent’s number. It can send that adult ahead to the receiving school to prepare the room before the child walks in, which is Tommy’s method. And its record can hold what the child said and what the adults did, and never a score, because a score written at ten travels from building to building and teaches each new adult what to expect of a boy before he has walked in.
Keep the entitlement and stop asking it to be the whole thing. I spent years running a family support department at a parent center in King County that worked with families in seventeen languages, and most of them came to us over an IEP. They fought for what the law promised their children, and often won it, and it was still not enough, because the law entitles a child to services and it cannot entitle a child to Dottie. Special education is a necessary part of the answer, and it was never built to be the answer. A family told to depend on it alone is being set up for the six years.
Build the base under the parent. The parent is the one who stays, and the parent is also the one who is being used up. The mother at a kitchen table in the fall of 2020, telling a camera she was not trained for this, is the person this part is for. She needs a broader base than a caseload can supply: other adults who stand beside her rather than between her and her child, who give grace to the parent and encouragement to the kid in the same breath, and who can say the one sentence a child in those years most needs to hear from an adult who is not his parent: “I am here, and I am not going anywhere.” For a family whose child will need them for life, the base has to include people who carry what the child carries, so that a frightened parent of a ten-year-old can look a forty-five-year-old with the same condition in the eye and see a life.
Give the town its three jobs. The first is a weekly place that does not depend on enrollment, because enrollment ends and a place does not have to: a community center, a church basement, a shop with a bench in it. The second is work at fourteen or fifteen with an adult who prepares the room rather than accommodating the kid, which is what Tommy did, and what Temple Grandin’s aunt did when she put a frightened teenager to work on a ranch. The third is a peer room where the condition is ordinary and no one is watched, which is what John’s camp is. None of these needs a credential. All of them need someone who will be there next week.
Let the held person teach. The arc that ended John’s six years was his own: the support group, the camp, the police stations. Adults with disabilities are the most qualified people in any town to prepare its rooms, and a day program for adults should count it as the work when its members teach the police, the employers, and the frightened parents, rather than counting only the hours a funder pays for.
Count the coming. One question, once a month, asked by whoever holds the plan: did someone come to the kitchen? The Harvard study’s eighty years are an argument that the coming was the finding. Make the coming the program.
The third truth
Disability does not predict violence. The children in that room were the victims, and they were in the most held room in the building. The danger now is that my sector answers Thursday by turning rooms like the NEST into the Gluecks’ table, with a new field for risk beside each child’s name, and the Gluecks already ran that experiment on a thousand boys. The eighty years that followed showed what the table missed, and what it missed was a person who kept coming.
Rhoam Summer was five. Megan Lambert was in her first year. The six years that ended at their door are the years no table can see and any town can hold, and the town has to start before the room ends.
Paul Tan is the founder of Good Protocols, SPC, and spent thirty years leading nonprofits serving young people and families in the Puget Sound region, including a parent center working in seventeen languages.
Related
The Membership, a practical ethos for the people who stay; Beside, Not Between, for the adults around a family; The Dignity of Owing, on help that carries a face; Where to Stand, on beside, in front, and at the table; and Rooms or Files, the one question to ask of anything offered to a neighborhood, including the table this essay describes.
Notes and Sources
The Silver Rail shooting of October 15, 2026, and the people in that room: the Bend Bulletin, KTVZ, the Associated Press, and Bend-La Pine Schools’ statement of October 17. The NEST program: KTVZ’s story of September 29, 2020, and the High Desert Education Service District’s program page. The names of the two boys whose families asked that they be kept are kept here.
The Gluecks’ table: Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (Commonwealth Fund, 1950). The New York City Youth Board’s ten years with it: Maude M. Craig and Selma J. Glick, “Ten Years’ Experience with the Glueck Social Prediction Table,” Crime and Delinquency (1963), and Joseph G. Weis, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1974).
What the files said when someone kept reading them: Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub, Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life (Harvard University Press, 1993); John H. Laub and Robert J. Sampson, Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70 (Harvard University Press, 2003); and their “Life-Course Desisters?,” Criminology (2003). The Harvard Study of Adult Development: Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, The Good Life (Simon & Schuster, 2023), and Waldinger’s 2015 TEDx talk, where the living-room interviews and the Boston men’s question are described.
Follett’s Boston years: Joan C. Tonn, Mary P. Follett: Creating Democracy, Transforming Management (Yale University Press, 2003), and Follett’s own The New State (1918).
Threat assessment: John Van Dreal, editor, Assessing Student Threats: Implementing the Salem-Keizer System (2011; second edition, 2017), and NPR’s report of February 13, 2019, where his sentence about despair and hope is spoken. The federal transition requirement is 34 CFR 300.320(b); Oregon’s compulsory attendance and its exceptions are ORS 339.010 and 339.030.
Galashiels: John Davidson, I Swear: My Life with Tourette’s (2025), and the published record of his life, including the film made about him and the events of February 2026. Temple Grandin’s aunt and the ranch: Thinking in Pictures.
The works in these notes open their cards on the Lineage Shelf, with doors to borrow them or buy them.