Here’s what never happened with four students from Oxford High School in Michigan.

Madisyn Baldwin, Justin Shilling, Hanna St. Juliana, and Tate Myre never got to spend Christmas with their families because they got in the way of a school shooter’s gun.

And here’s what can’t happen anytime in the future. One day, Madysyn, a talented artist, opens a gallery to display her original artwork. Here’s what might have happened. Justin becomes a professional golfer or bowler we get to see on TV. What else could have happened? Hanna, who was known all around as a person of unselfish kindness, helps someone survive and succeed from a life of despair. And we’ll never know if football player Tate Myre used his scholarship offers to play at the college level and perhaps beyond in the National Football League.

None of these events can ever happen because no one stopped Ethan Crumbley from carrying out his deadly act of madness on that fateful day. If the reports leading up to the assault are accurate, you have to scratch your head and wonder why no one did.

Crumbley had drawn a picture of a stick figure shooting a gun at other figures. His drawing alarmed his teacher, who sent him to the administration for questioning.

What happened next befuddles the common sense of the human mind. Apparently, this 15-year-old convinced counselors with their multiple years of experience that his drawing was an idea for a video game and that he wanted to pursue a career in such an industry. His parents were called to the school and after being told of the drawing, they left the premises without their son. He was permitted to return to class with his backpack that allegedly held the gun he used to kill the four students and wound seven others.

Why did the administration not summon a law officer to check the backpack? Wasn’t there reasonable suspicion? Why didn’t they tell his parents to take their son home with them?

CNN reports that school shooters often give off signs that they might be planning an act of violence. They display drastic changes in behavior. They become excessively angry. Some will isolate or alienate themselves from the rest of the student body.

FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole says that in most cases involving a student shooter there is what she calls “leakage.” He tells others or gives clues about wanting to get a gun and kill people in the school, but his threats are often ignored or not taken seriously.

O’Toole says that students who hear of these threats are afraid to come forward because they don’t want to get the potential shooter in trouble, who then might retaliate. She says that student informants need to know that whatever concerns they bring to the administration will be handled anonymously.

Schools across the country have been conducting intruder drills where teachers lock classroom doors and move their students to the back corners of their rooms. O’Toole says each school district should also have a threat assessment team to monitor students with extreme behavior issues and question their parents if guns are readily available in their homes.

School safety consultant and past president of the National Association of School Psychologists Melissa Reeves says that administrators should not rush to judgment and suspend or expel a student who exhibits a propensity to carry out an act of violence. This might escalate his anger.

Isn’t it prudent to err on the side of caution and have the student removed from the building for outside evaluation? In fact, if everyone gets it wrong that a student shows signs he might take a gun into the school, but never carries out a plan to kill, then I say good. It’s better to be wrong then it is to be right in these cases.

Experts in the study of school shootings warn that educators and parents in America should not think these horrific events “will never happen in our school.” This is where my concern gets personal. I have two children who attend high school, and every time I hear of another shooting, I worry more for my kids’ safety, and for that matter, I worry for everybody’s kids’ safety in their schools, too.

According to CNN, from 2009 to 2019, there have been 180 school shootings and 356 victims, and the number of casualties has been growing since then.

In 2018, a group of emotional survivors of a school shooting in a Florida high school spoke about their ordeal to President Donald Trump. His response was, “We hear you. What can we do to help keep you safe?” Should we be asking children to come up with ideas to protect themselves? Leadership at every level continues to turn their heads from this problem instead of making these horrific tragedies their priority.

Some say that threat assessment teams are impractical. Others feel metal detectors and the presence of an in-school security officer are sufficient deterrents to student shooters. Yet many of these shootings have occurred despite these safety measures. Intruders can come through a back or side door, and once inside, a security officer can do little to stop the onslaught.

It was once proposed that the perimeter of every school have an underground cable alarm system that detects gun ammunition. The idea was passed off as improbable and too expensive to install at every school in America.

Improbable, they say? The principle of the system is based upon something many dog owners have in their yards called invisible fences. The dog is stopped from stepping outside the yard by an underground cable that’s alarmed with the dog’s collar.

Too expensive, they say? More than $160 billion in revenue was collected by Apple on their sale of just their cellphones in 2018. How about the techno-industry kick in some of their money to keep our kids safe and use the expense as a tax write off?

If we do nothing more to keep our kids safe in school, then the next victim’s family will have only to think about what never happened.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.