This was to have been a different piece - on our visit to the Race Exhibit at the Science Museum as a full faculty and staff on Monday afternoon. I would have tried to weave the threads together of the Don Imus incident, the trial of the Duke Lacrosse players and the ongoing attempts we all make to come to terms with the meaning of race in our society.

But gunshots emanating from a college campus, ringing through the media and across the country have somehow disturbed the natural order and made it harder to piece together those ideas for readers of this blog. Images and sounds from Virginia Tech describe a chaos and senselessness, leaving a wake of individual and collective loss. The passing hours bring new faces and stories of personal loss.

Coincidentally, on Monday morning at MPA, we ran another of our practice "lockdown" drills. Code regulations have been changed this year to conform to the changing realities of public buildings. Where once we were required to run ten fire drills every year and one lockdown, code now requires fewer fire drills and more lockdown drills. With the advent of sprinkler systems, fire retardant building materials and improved alarm systems, the risk of fire has declined considerably in the last generation.

The need for lockdown drills, as Monday's incident in Virginia demonstrates, have increased. So, as it happens, just as the carnage was taking place over a thousand miles away, we were practicing for what we hope will never happen here.  (Click here for more information about our procedures.)

The comfort, if there is any to be had in all of this, can to be found in some statistics that may seem counterintuitive. Violence in K-12 schools is actually on the decline, notwithstanding high profile incidents of the last decade. According to an article on the website "greatschools.net":

"Every year the federal government issues what it calls a snapshot of school violence. This survey, called Indicators of School Crime and Safety, is a compilation of data from several government agencies, including the FBI, the Center for Disease Control and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The survey looks at victimization, bullying, student perceptions of school safety and many other topics.

"The latest of these snapshots was released in 2006, using data from 2003 through 2006. This study, and others, indicate that: 1) Statistically, school is the safest place for children to be. 2) Students are more likely to be victims of violence outside of school than inside. 3) School-related violence is on the decline."

Some comfort perhaps, but we still prepare. And when the country reacts together in horror at another high profile incident, we look for reasons.

Which brings me back to race. Early in the coverage of the Virginia Tech incident, the shooter was anonymous. Then, as facts began to emerge, he was "Asian." For a while, he was said to be from Shanghai. Then it came out that he was a Korean national on a resident visa. Through it all, we have been collectively searching for some kind of identifiers, something to put this young man in a category where we can see and understand him, as if what he did can ever be "understood" in any real sense.

How many of us, when we heard of it, unconsciously or consciously attached significance to his ethnic identity? How many of us constructed some meaning from the gathering parts of the story in which his race played a role?

So perhaps there is some organizing idea to the week's events - that the ideas and experiences of race are pervasive.

We are grateful to the MPA Parents Association for funding our trip to the exhibit this week and for funding the trip of the Upper School MOSAIC student group earlier this month. We asked the students in the group to pose some questions to faculty and staff before and after the Monday visit to the museum, which they did.

We toured the exhibit Monday afternoon, then gathered in small groups to reflect on the questions our students had so thoughtfully provided. So many good questions, some unanswerable. Like the ones coming out of Virginia Tech this week.

Our visit was part of the permanent effort in which all quality schools are engaged - to know our community. To the degree that we can really know, be known and reach out to the different parts of our "whole," our drills will always be just that - only drills. We work hard at MPA to know each and every child as an individual. And we work hard at understanding the larger social and cultural forces at work in shaping our world.    

Below are some images of MPA faculty and staff touring the exhibit and in discussion groups afterwards. Note that the exhibit Race - Are We So Different runs through May 6th and is well worth the trip.  To learn about the exhibit, visit www.smm.org/race/