Safety concerns linger six months after teen killed at Ingraham High

Six months after Seattle Superintendent Brent Jones promised to review and update safety measures after a shooting at Ingraham High School left one student dead, students and parents say they’re frustrated by the district’s lack of communication and failure to provide timely updates. 

On Nov. 8, 17-year-old Ebenezer Haile was shot by another student in a school hallway. The next day, Jones announced a new safety initiative: Seattle Public Schools would assemble a community action team of school, police, city and community leaders to assess how safety can be improved at schools and surrounding neighborhoods. 

To address mental health, a child wellness team made up of psychologists, counselors, pediatricians and social workers would be launched. Jones also said the district would conduct an audit of safety plans at Ingraham and safety reviews of the district’s 106 schools.

The district says it has accomplished all of those tasks. But Friends of Ingraham, a nonprofit group led by Ingraham High parents, has sent three letters to the district asking for more information.

The group asked for the outcome of the audit, what safety policies and procedures have been changed as a result, and whether policies and procedures leading up to the shooting and following the shooting were followed.

The parent group had a discussion with Jones set up in March, but it was delayed, said Kathleen Zagers, co-president of Friends of Ingraham. A meeting is set for this week.

“Essentially we noticed pretty early on — the day after the shooting and prior to students coming back to school — some gaps in communication,” Zagers said. “Since the beginning, we asked for clear communication from the district to our families and most of the letters express frustration that we have to ask for this.”

Jones’ staff scheduled an interview with The Seattle Times for this story, then later canceled, but they have said they will reschedule. During a recent School Board meeting, Jones acknowledged the delays in updates to the community and said the district is working on it. 

Parents say their frustrations and concerns were heightened after a video was posted on social media of a student who attends Nathan Hale High School holding a gun in the parking lot at Ingraham. Police confiscated the gun from the student on the Nathan Hale campus.

Students weren’t notified of the incident, said Sofie Blazejova, a senior at Ingraham and co-president of the student group Ingraham for Gun Safety.

“I found that very frustrating,” she said. “A lot of students didn’t know that happened until we got to school that day and I felt immediately unsafe and we couldn’t go anywhere if we did not have transportation.”

The Ingraham shooting has left Haile’s family in shock.

“It pains me every time I hear of violent incidents in our schools,” Tsedale Woldemariam, Haile’s mother, said in a text message. “I don’t want any family to go through what we’re going through. Our schools have to be made safer. Families have to have peace of mind that their kids who are sent to school in the morning are coming back home.” 

She wrote that her son’s death “left a big hole in our lives. He was a sweet boy who cared not just for me and his brother, but also for our large family and his friends. He was a role model to his cousins and nephews. Without him, we are struggling to find meaning in our everyday lives. He had so many plans for his future. His joyful life was cut short unnecessarily and senselessly. This should not have happened.”

Safety changes 

According to a statement from SPS officials, the district created a community action team and a wellness team soon after the shooting. The wellness team is working on creating a citywide youth mental health response protocol.  

The community action team is reviewing data and “assessing shared experiences across the district, the city, and community partners,” according to the district’s website. It’s unclear what data the group is reviewing. 

Safety reviews for each school are also in progress. Jones has said it would take time, and would start with high schools. The district has not said how many schools have been reviewed so far or who is conducting the reviews. 

An early recommendation from the reviews was to add safety and emergency signs in schools and update locks so they can be locked from the inside. 

The safety and emergency signs include the phone number for a safety hotline and instructions on what to do during a shelter-in-place, lockdown and evacuation event. Officials said every school will have signs by the end of the school year.

The district is halfway through the process of changing 15,000 locks. Locks are being updated at 10 schools currently and should be done by the end of the school year, officials said. In the next school year, 22 schools will have new locks, and in the 2024-25 school year, 18 more schools will be updated.

The district is also working on an app that will allow people to report safety concerns anonymously.

A consultant has reviewed physical safety and security at Ingraham High. SPS officials are reviewing the report and considering ways to improve safety at Ingraham and other schools, officials said. Reviews of other schools are underway by third-party security consultants.  

SPS will not be discussing the report from the consultant, officials said, because it includes sensitive information and “security vulnerabilities at a school could be of great interest and assistance to someone intending to cause harm at that school.” 

“We understand the interest in knowing the consultant’s recommendations about Ingraham,” SPS officials said. “State law recognizes the heightened sensitivity of information compiled by school districts to identify safety and security vulnerabilities of individual schools and the district as a whole and exempts that information from public disclosure.”    

It is reviewing Ingraham High School’s emergency plans, training on emergencies, door locks and locking systems, camera and video systems, the role and visibility of campus security personnel, internal and external communications capabilities, campus signs and alterations to external landscaping to ensure clear lines of camera and visual surveillance.

Ingraham High has multiple entry points, Blazejova said. Some of those entries are locked, but Blazejova said she believes others in high-traffic areas are unlocked. Extra security officers were at Ingraham soon after the shooting, but Blazejova said she hasn’t seen them recently. 

After the shooting, Ingraham got a full-time social worker and two part-time mental health counselors, said Saeran Dewar, a junior at Ingraham and co-founder and co-president of Ingraham for Gun Safety. She said it’s important to focus on mental health resources at schools rather than police or school resource officers.

“Personally, the thing that makes me feel safer at school is the immense progress the Washington Legislature made in gun safety laws,” Dewar said. She said she believes “the vast majority of American high school students are not going to feel safe until we see action on a federal level.”

Blazejova said she believes it would help to have more mental health counselors, not only to process the trauma of the shooting, but help students deal with everything else that goes on at school.

“I personally would like more transparency from staff members and administrators because I do feel there is a separation between adults in our building and the children that go there,” Blazejova said. 

“Unfortunately, I think that fear of possibly dying at your school is always going to be with me. I’m going off to college next year and something that will be on my mind when I walk through campus is the possibility of it happening again.”