Thomas S. Wootton High School opened its doors Tuesday, less than a day after a student fired a gun at a classmate, injuring the 16-year-old boy and shattering the community’s sense of safety.

“Everyone is in shock,” Wootton PTSA President Brian Rabin said. “We know it could happen at any school, but it’s very scary when your child is in the building.”

Many parents decided it was too soon for their teenagers to return to class and kept them out. Some students hadn’t returned home until after 8 p.m because it took hours to reunite them with their families.

Explaining the decision to reopen, Superintendent Thomas Taylor said students should have the chance to connect with mental health professionals at school.

Police haven’t released details about what they allege led to a student shooting a fellow teenager. They announced Tuesday that a 16-year-old was being charged as an adult with attempted second-degree murder.

Families are left questioning how this happened — and what could prevent it from happening again. Those same questions emerged in 2022, when a shooting just miles away, at Magruder High School, also left one student injured.

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Should Montgomery County Public Schools have metal detectors? Should they assign police officers to schools as they once did? How should they communicate with parents as their worst nightmare unfolds?

Taylor said after the shooting that the district is piloting an AI-powered weapons detection system at three high schools. That move — and other big-picture decisions — will be closely scrutinized in the coming months.

For now, though, Wootton students and teachers have to get through the week.

Reopening school

Rabin criticized district leaders for reopening Wootton the day after the shooting, saying both students and teachers needed time to unpack what had happened.

“Parents don’t feel like there should have been school today, especially with the lateness of the hour where parents were stuck trying to be reunited with their students,” he said. “Students are just exhausted and traumatized.”

In a joint email to families, Taylor and Wootton Principal Joseph Bostic said it was important make an array of mental health professionals available to students through the school. The district brought in counselors, social workers, psychologists and administrators to help students.

“Today is not about academics or returning to ‘normal,’” they wrote. “It is about ensuring that students and staff have access to mental health supports, trusted adults, and one another.”

Still, they acknowledged parents’ hesitation to send their children back to campus. Student absences will be excused.

“We know that the effects of a traumatic event do not follow a set timeline, and that reactions can surface or change over time. For that reason, mental health supports will remain available well beyond this week,” they said. “Yesterday altered our community, and it is okay to admit that.”

The campus hosted two parent meetings on Tuesday, one at 3:30 p.m. and another at 6 p.m.

Preventing shootings

The Wootton shooting already reignited conversations in Montgomery County about whether the school system does enough to protect students from guns.

Its campuses do not have metal detectors. Taylor said Monday night that the district recently launched an “artificial intelligence weapons detection” pilot program at Seneca Valley, Bethesda-Chevy Chase and Magruder high schools.

“There’s still a lot for us to learn about weapons detection and how it can best serve our community. We’re not married to any particular approach or any particular idea, but I think that we’re certainly exploring it,” he said.

Several other school districts have rolled out similar technology.

In October, a Baltimore County high school’s AI-powered weapon detection system triggered a false alarm that led police to point their weapons at a student who had been eating a bag of chips.

Brigid Howe, president of the Montgomery County Council of PTAs, said such technology could potentially work as a tool in the district’s toolkit.

“The question we have to ask is if they’re the right tools for MCPS at this time,” she said.

Her other questions are more specific to Monday’s incident. Howe wanted to know: “Were there warning signs for this individual child, and were they getting the support that they needed?”

Also ripe for debate in Wootton’s aftermath is the role of police in schools.

The district stopped assigning officers, known as school resource officers, to campuses in 2021. The decision came amid a national reckoning over how Black people are treated by law enforcement and local concerns that school-based officers disproportionately arrested children of color.

MCPS replaced its school-based officers with “community engagement officers,” police who patrol the communities surrounding campuses.

The officer assigned to the Wootton area was “attending to an issue” at nearby Lakewood Elementary and not at the high school campus at the time of the shooting, according to Rockville City Police Chief James West.

Some wonder if a police officer stationed on campus would make a difference. Many recall the Marjory Stoneman Douglas mass shooting, when an armed school resource officer never went inside the Parkland high school or engaged the gunman.

“For Black parents, this is such a difficult topic because there is absolutely a justified reluctance and hesitation when it comes to conversations around police in schools,” said Ricky Ribeiro, a leader with the Black Coalition for Excellence in Education. “We’re not safe when there’s more police and we’re not safe when the school system fails to keep our kids safe.”

Ribeiro wants to see more robust changes when it comes to protecting Montgomery County kids.

“Magruder should have been when everything around safety and security changed,” he said.

Learning from the past

A 17-year-old Magruder student brought a “ghost gun” to school in 2022, using it to shoot a 15-year-old classmate in a campus bathroom.

In the aftermath, parents said they received delayed and confusing messages from district staff about the shooting and how to pick-up their children. A 12-page After-Action Report outlined the missteps, saying that a “lack of communication caused misinformation and confusion for parents and students.”

Parents were once again upset by the reunification efforts following the Wootton shooting.

Instructions about where to pick up their children flip-flopped and it took hours, in some cases, to snake through a long line of parents.

“People were abandoning their cars because they could not move and they wanted to get to their children,” Rabin said.

The district, Howe said, should take a “hard look at reunification procedures.”