Some Berkeley High Students Say They Should Have Been Warned Sooner of Alleged Plot to Attack School

It wasn’t the type of news Mim Walter-Welch expected — or wanted — to receive during their final week of high school.

But, then again, much about Walter-Welch’s pandemic-infused secondary school experience hasn’t gone anywhere remotely according to plan.

The last few years “have been very stressful,” Walter-Welch, a Berkeley High School senior who uses they/them pronouns said on Thursday afternoon, just after completing their final day of high school.

To cap off a year full of undesired plot twists, Walter-Welch and thousands of their fellow students on Wednesday night received an email from the school announcing that Berkeley police had arrested a 16-year-old boy suspected of trying to recruit other students to participate in a shooting or bombing at their school. The note explained that police had received a tip from an individual in the community nearly a week and a half earlier and searched the boy’s home, where investigators found explosives components and assault rifles, several knives and electronic items that could be used to create additional weapons. The suspect, who has not yet been identified, was arrested on Monday after turning himself in, police said.

Police have not released the name of the suspect or confirmed whether he is a student at the school. It’s also still unclear whether other people were involved in the plot.

Walter-Welch has generally felt safe at school during their four years here, during which no major incidents have happened, they said. But, in this instance, they are critical of the administration for not alerting students much earlier.

Stephens said the district, like most school districts, is prepared for a wide range of security “contingencies.”

“We’ve been thinking about these issues for quite some time,” he said. “And that set of contingencies seems to be expanding very rapidly over the last several years.”

Schools in the district have for years prepared for intruder and active-shooter events, and are required to annually update and submit school safety plans, Stephens said.

In a follow-up letter to parents on Thursday, he also noted that every classroom in the district now has “Columbine” locks on the doors, which enable teachers to secure them from inside without a key.

Officials have also begun a new comprehensive review to assess campus vulnerabilities, and recently created a full-time safety coordinator position “for the purpose of maintaining the freshness of everybody’s knowledge related to all of these contingencies,” Stephens said.

The district, he added, is also trying to expand mental health resources for students, including the creation of a new district-wide mental health coordinator position, while also building on curriculum to help students identify concerning behavior among their peers, and appropriately report it.

“There are a whole set of pressures that our young people are experiencing, some related to the pandemic, others related to social media and what feels like the increasing pervasiveness of violence in our society,” Stephens said. “So we’ve been having conversations over the last two years to sort of build on previous efforts about expanding mental health supports for all of our students K-12.”

For Walter-Welch, all of these incidents and precautions serve to underscore what they hold as a simple truth: that now, more than ever before, being a high school student can be tough.