LITTLE ROCK — Rachel Scott would not ask to be brought back today, her father, Darrell Scott, said.
Her death at Columbine High School last spring came at the end of a year of intense spiritual introspection, a year of asking God to use her for whatever he needed. After reading the poems in her diaries and seeing her drawings, Darrell Scott said he knows God intended his daughter's death and those of her classmates to mean something.
Speaking along with state school officials and Mitch Wright, the husband of the teacher killed in the Westside Middle School shootings in 1998, Scott said the rash of school shootings in the nation, culminating with the massacre at Columbine, are a sign of spiritual warfare, of a nation frayed to the breaking point.
The group addressed educators, school administrators and state representatives from Bryant and the surrounding area. They spoke from different perspectives and articulated their thoughts in different ways, some religious and some secular.
But their messages were similar. In the search for answers to school violence, we have sought the complex and ignored the simple, they said. Governments and school districts can help, but ultimately individuals -- teachers, administrators and parents alike -- must reach out and make new connections, spiritual and otherwise, to children and others in the community.
"Get to know your kids," Wright urged the 60 educators gathered at the First Southern Baptist Church in Bryant.
Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden, the two boys convicted in the Westside shootings, warned their classmates months in advance, but none of the children came forward to teachers or administrators, Wright said.
"I would give anything in the world for one of those children to have come up to an administrator or teacher and said, 'I heard something -- I don't know how true it is but I'd like for you to check it out,'" he said.
Olan Reeves, chief legal counsel for Gov. Mike Huckabee and a former kindergarten teacher, and Ray Simon, director of the Arkansas Department of Education, both said the government and schools can do some things to help. They can provide resources for schools to learn how to prevent violence and they can create programs to help children who fall behind in school. But it will take individuals to make schools safe, they said.
Scott, who has been speaking to groups around the nation for the past 2 1/2 months, is in Bryant for a rally at the Bryant football stadium tonight where crosses representing the students killed at Columbine will be displayed.
He showed slides of the students killed at Columbine and told stories about each one. He stopped on the picture of his daughter, Rachel, a pretty brunette who wanted to be an actress and a missionary.
He told stories of her life and spirituality that he didn't even know before she died, and he told of the ways God has spoken to him through her diaries and the words and prayers of complete strangers.
He has become convinced, he said, that the nation has passed the breaking point. The secularism of today's society will be rebuffed by a new generation reaching out for connection, Scott said.
"My mission in life is not to change policy or legislation but to turn to the children," he said.
Copyright © 2007, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.