Bend's Silver Rail Shooter Was Chronically Absent. Then He Disappeared. - The Source

Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek spent a Saturday morning in October 2025 at Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, helping make phone calls to hundreds of families in Bend-La Pine Schools to encourage and celebrate good attendance. On the call list were students who had gone from being chronically absent to regularly attending school.

Meanwhile, one sophomore at Bend Tech Academy and former Silver Rail student, Griffin John II, was descending rapidly on a different trajectory. He’d missed weeks at a time on several occasions over several years.

A month after Kotek’s visit, he left for good.

Less than a year later, he returned to Silver Rail — his former elementary school — with a shotgun, killing three students and a teacher.

Nearly two weeks after the Oct. 15 tragedy, many questions remain about how the young assailant got ahold of the gun, what his family life was like and what motivated him to carry out the violence. But in a state with some of the highest absentee rates in the nation, gaps in the shooter’s enrollment at Bend-La Pine Schools also raise questions about who should step in when kids don’t go to school and whether there are enough tools to pull them back to class.

“The safety net failed,” said Amy Tatom, who chairs the board of directors for Bend-La Pine Schools. “We don’t have a strong enough safety net to help our most vulnerable students and families.”

People embrace Oct. 17 near a memorial for victims of the Oct. 15 shooting at Silver Rail Elementary. Credit: Clayton Franke

“When we see dips in attendance, that’s a warning sign,” she added.

Gaps in attendance

Bend-La Pine Schools declined to provide attendance and student records for John, citing federal and state privacy laws. While it’s not clear exactly how often he attended school, or what his experience was like, the student’s enrollment history shows large gaps in his schooling.

John started kindergarten at Elk Meadow Elementary in 2015. As a third grader at Silver Rail, he started in the special education program.

Mary Sheridan’s child, who is now 17, was in that same program with John. Sheridan described it as a classroom focused on social and emotional learning geared toward students with behavioral needs.

Because there was relatively little instruction, Sheridan said, her student fell behind in learning. That didn’t matter as much at first, but by the time her child reached late middle school and high school, it became more obvious.

“That led to them feeling embarrassed and frustrated in class, and then not showing up to class and falling farther and farther behind,” said Sheridan, who also writes a monthly column on psychedelics for the Source.

There would be days when her child didn’t want to go to school, Sheridan said.

But “nobody followed up. There was no real consequences.”

As for John, attendance issues began in fourth grade, when he was unenrolled for more than a month. In seventh grade, he dropped off the district’s rolls from Feb. 23 through April 6, and from May 9 through the end of the school year. In 2024 he moved to Bend Tech Academy, a career and technical education school that since merged with another magnet school to form Deschutes River High School. He missed the final few weeks of his freshman year and left for good the next fall.

The Silver Rail Elementary shooting perpetrator was last enrolled at Bend Tech Academy in November 2025. The school on Fifth Street in Bend is now the home of Deschutes River High School, a merger between the tech academy and another magnet school. Credit: Clayton Franke

Court records indicate both of John’s parents had a history of run-ins with the law. John lived a few blocks away from Silver Rail with his mother, Shauntai Nickerson, who was arrested for assault — but never convicted — in 2023, instead pleading to a lesser charge of harassment. John’s father, who is reportedly unhoused in Astoria, has been convicted of felony assault of a public safety officer and, later, illegal possession of weapons.

It’s unclear what specific efforts the district made to get John to come back. Those communications are also protected under privacy laws, said district spokesperson Scott Maben.

But the district’s attendance policy outlines how the process should go: Staff should make at least two attempts — phone calls, home visits, text messages — to check in within the first 10 days of unexcused absences. After 10 consecutive days of absence, state law requires school districts to temporarily unenroll students, a rule meant to ensure proportional funding is distributed properly.

The district provides interventions and supports in an effort not to lose contact once students are unenrolled, and students can return and reenroll at any time, Maben said.

According to its website, the district also helps connect families to a variety of nonprofit services to address basic needs that might be a barrier for students to attend school.

“We prioritize connection and positive relationships with our students and families to support them feeling welcomed and that they belong in our schools,” Maben said in a statement. “This is the most powerful strategy in supporting regular attendance.”

Many times, the outreach succeeds, Superintendent Steve Cook told the Source Oct. 19. Other times, it doesn’t — and there’s not much more the district can do.

Bend-La Pine Schools administrative headquarters in downtown Bend. Credit: Bend La Pine Schools Administration

“When students stop coming, we certainly engage to try to get them back to school,” Cook said. “If they don’t respond to that, then potentially this is the kind of thing that could happen, where an entire year could pass and a student is no longer anywhere around school.

“Outside of a home visit, there’s not much more we’ve got,” Cook added.

Eastern Oregon provides a case study

While Oregon law requires children to attend school, the parents of those who stop going don’t face legal consequences. In 2021, Oregon became one of the first states in the country to get rid of fines and citations for truancy, instead focusing on student support and removing barriers to attendance. The Legislature stripped superintendents’ power to issue a Class C violation to parents whose children aren’t in school, which carried a maximum $500 fine.

Proponents of the legislation argued that fees or citations did more harm than good and were likely to disproportionately effect Black or Indigenous students.

They worried truancy fines feed the “school-to-prison pipeline” — a phenomenon where legally punishing student behavior only further entrenches disadvantaged youth in the justice system.

“There’s pretty strong evidence that rather than serving a deterring effect for these kids, justice system involvement is actually a promoter of delinquency,” said Stephanie Wiley, a University of Oregon professor who studies juvenile justice and education.

There’s also a strong association between skipping school and dropping out and delinquency, Wiley said — not only because of underlying factors that lead to both, but because when kids aren’t in school, they simply have more time to be involved in crimes.

Oregon is consistently among states with the highest rates of chronic absenteeism in the country, according to Future Ed, a Georgetown University think tank. About one-third of students meet the definition of chronically absent, which is defined as missing more than 10% of school days. Bend-La Pine’s attendance rates have slowly recovered following a blow from the pandemic, but are still no higher than the state’s poor averages.

And there is some evidence — at least anecdotally — that threat of fees or citations helps prevent chronic absence in the first place, even when used as a last resort.

In 2023, educators in eastern Oregon convinced Malheur County to pass a local ordinance bringing back the power to issue fines or citations for truancy. Since then, Malheur County attendance rates have climbed from about 72% to 83.5% — nearly 20% higher than the statewide average.

The Vale School District Superintendent told the Oregon Journalism Project she believes the local ordinance made a difference.

But the fines were always a last resort. The district issued 47 truancy citations last school year but only one fine. In most cases, a judge in truancy court assigned services like parenting classes or mental health referrals instead of fines.

The attendance policy on Bend-La Pine’s website says staff should “monitor and report” attendance law violations to the superintendent. The policy also implies that parents of children not in school could be in violation of a statute called “failing to supervise a child.”

According to the Deschutes County Juvenile Community Justice Department, law enforcement or school district officials may refer families to child welfare or juvenile authorities if “educational neglect” is suspected. But that’s “not a practice” the department experiences, it said in a statement. The juvenile justice department would only be involved with a young person’s attendance if actively supervising the person for another delinquency matter, the County department said.

Tatom, the Bend-La Pine Schools chair, said she took note of the results from Malheur County when she read about it earlier this year. One thing she appreciated about the approach was that despite the legal threat, fines rarely came into play. Instead, the focus was on getting families what they needed to get kids back in school.

She said a more robust “community approach” involving service providers to support families could be in order for Deschutes County.

Tatom didn’t specifically say whether she wanted to push to bring back fines and citations for chronic absence. She said she doesn’t disagree with social justice arguments against truancy courts, but there comes a point when society should stand up for children’s rights to an education.

“If it is something that we can work on to help their student get to school, we should be doing that as a society,” Tatom said. “If you have someone who truly doesn’t care, that’s when I think it gets escalated.”

State leaders said they’re waiting for more details from the investigation into the shooter before applying lessons learned to policy.

When asked about attendance at a news conference on Monday, Kotek recalled her visit to Silver Rail one year ago.

“Those parents love their kids, and they love their school,” Kotek said. “When it comes to the 16-year-old shooter, we have to examine — and there will be a long conversation — about what were those points and decision points that could be different to help a young person like that who wasn’t engaged with their school district or other services.

“We just don’t know yet, but that is something we could do better,” she added.