Skyler Laughlin’s daughter’s desk sits next to a window near the front of the school at Lava Ridge Elementary in northeast Bend. When he toured the classroom earlier this year, he was excited about the prospect of his daughter getting more natural light to help her learning.
Now — days after a 16-year-old gunman shot through the glass panes near the front doors of Silver Rail Elementary on his way to killing three children, a teacher and wounding two others in a classroom — Laughlin sees it differently.
“That’s such a normal thing to say: awesome — natural light, how cool,” Laughlin told the Source on Monday. “Unfortunately, the way things are today, you flip your mindset and go, ‘that’s a safety concern.’”
Bend-La Pine Schools canceled school through Tuesday as people grieved at vigils and memorials, hundreds of people sought trauma services and businesses and other groups whipped up support events and free food.
Families across Bend are feeling a mix of anticipation and fear as they prepare to return their children to school on Wednesday. That will be nearly a week after the Oct. 15 shooting rocked the community. Meanwhile, the district is working with school leaders to help them deal with their own grief, and to guide the difficult conversations they’ll have students on that first day back.
That way, “When 16,000 students — minus one elementary school’s worth of students — come back on Wednesday, they can enter into an environment in which they can have conversations with trusted adults on what they might be experiencing,” BLPS Superintendent Steve Cook told the Source Monday.
As the district looks to create an emotionally supportive environment after the shooting, it’s also promised a larger conversation with the community about how to make schools physically safer.
As a short-term measure, Bend Police will provide a heightened presence near district schools, Cook said.
The district is still working with police to sort out exactly what that presence will look like and how long it might go on, Bend police spokesperson Sheila Miller said via email on Monday. Cook said it will likely mean more officers around the schools but not walking around the hallways, except for school resource officers.
The district has eight of those school-based cops to cover 33 schools. There wasn’t an officer at Silver Rail when the shooting occurred.
Other than police presence, the district isn’t making any immediate changes for school safety, Cook said.
For Mara Isbell, mother of a first grader at Highland Elementary in west Bend, walking her child to school on Wednesday will be “really hard.”
“There have been multiple days I’ve cried at drop-off wondering if that would be the last day I see my kid,” Isbell said on Monday. “For it to all become real in our community is absolutely heartbreaking.”
Isbell, who teaches at Mudpies Lullabies, a preschool in Bend, said staff at her school met the day after the shooting to go over safety protocols.
“Looking around the room, we were all crying knowing every one of us would do whatever we needed to do to protect our students,” Isbell said.
For Laughlin, who has a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old at Lava Ridge, classroom windows were a safety concern even before the shooting. Last year, a lawnmower threw a rock through one of the windows in his daughter’s classroom, he said. Nobody was hurt.
Bulletproof glass, razor wire and more cameras are all safety ideas that Cook has heard floated since the shooting. How far the district should go to harden its schools from attacks will be an important community conversation going forward, Cook said. He promised a “top to bottom” analysis of “what worked, what didn’t, and what are some other steps that we may want to consider.”
It’s not the first time traumatic incidents have led to safety reviews at Bend-La Pine Schools. In 2014, a Bend High student fatally shot himself in the school. In 2024, a student brought a loaded gun to Pilot Butte Middle School, along with a list of targets, but didn’t harm anyone.
For about 10 years the district has had 13 “campus monitors” at middle schools and high schools who are responsible for school safety, according to information provided by the district. There’s also a full-time Behavioral Threat Assessment manager, whose role is to “assess and manage student threats and concerning behavior,” according to the district. The district has standard response protocols for lockdowns and evacuations and runs lockdown drills twice a year at each school. There are also cameras throughout the interior and exterior of schools. Each school has a vestibule with electronic locks at its main entrance, and upgraded classroom door locks were recently installed using $5.5 million of a $250 million school construction bond.
Cook acknowledged that school hardening would come with funding hurdles and trade-offs. Some measures, like razor wire, might not stop a determined assailant, while bulletproof glass wouldn’t stop a student who’s already inside the school, he said.
“Those are the kinds of challenges we face,” Cook said. “We want to balance creating a school that is a school and not mimicking or mirroring the security level that is at a prison. But at what point are we not doing enough? That’s the part we’re going to want to engage with our community about.”
Despite some safety concerns around windows, Laughlin said his kids are ready to return to Lava Ridge.
“They’ve been missing their friends and missing the routine,” he said.
Isbell echoed that sentiment.
“It’s going to be emotional, but I think we’re all rallying together too, to help our kids get back into their routine and support our kids’ teachers,” she said.
That’s not the case for everyone. BLPS Communications Director Scott Maben said “we can expect” that some parents won’t bring their kids back to school on Wednesday.
As for Silver Rail, Cook said it’s still too early to discuss logistical details on when the school might reopen or when students might resume their school year.
“We’re going to have to talk about it at some point, what does it look like,” Cook said. “Some people might be thinking, ‘I want to be back in that school quickly and reclaim it,’ and some people are like, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever walk in that school again,’ and everything in between, I anticipate. That conversation is not ours to have by ourselves.”
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