Alex played in the marching band.

Friday nights he put on the uniform, walked out onto that field at halftime, and played for a crowd that was mostly in line for nachos. He did not care even a little. He loved it.

Three months before he was murdered, the Eagle Regiment won the state championship at Tropicana Field. I have a photograph of the two of us from that night. He is still in uniform. He looks like a kid who just found out he is good at something.

I went to those games. I sat in those bleachers. I paid too much for a hot dog, I complained about the parking, I looked at my phone. Not once in my life did it occur to me that my son was standing in the middle of an open field in the dark, with thousands of strangers behind him and three gates propped open at the back of the lot.

Why would it. It was a football game.

A boy in Bakersfield

On the night of August 21, a high school in Bakersfield, California played its season opener. Somewhere in the stands an argument started. A seventeen year old boy was shot and killed inside the stadium. A fifteen year old has been arrested.

Season opener. First Friday of the year. The whole town was there.

I know what that house sounds like right now. I know about the casseroles nobody eats and the phone that will not stop and the moment three weeks in when the crowd thins out and you are alone in it. I know that there is a bedroom in that house that nobody has been able to walk into yet.

That family is at the beginning of something that does not end. And they got there because their son went to a football game.

I have been thinking about that boy all month. Not as a policy question. As a father. But when I could not sleep I did what I always do now, which is go find the numbers.

Seventeen

Education Week tracks shootings on K-12 school property that result in injuries or deaths. Since they started counting in 2018, forty-three of those shootings happened at high school football games.

Those forty-three killed seventeen people and injured seventy-one.

Seventeen.

I want you to sit with that number, because I know it better than I know my own phone number. Seventeen is how many we buried in Parkland. Seventeen is the number on the banner. Seventeen is the number I have said out loud in front of Congress and in front of governors and in front of rooms full of superintendents who could not look at me while I said it.

We have lost a Parkland at football games. Four one season, eight another, in towns you have never heard of, spread out over eight years so that no single night was big enough to make the country stop.

There was no commission. No task force. No law named after any of them.

Football game shootings are seventeen percent of every school shooting in that tracker. Roughly one in six. Not in a classroom. Not in a hallway. At a game.

The year that proved it

There is one year in that data that does not look like the others, and it is the most useful thing in the entire set.

In 2020, districts canceled games, capped attendance, or closed the stands entirely. The number collapsed. Not because anyone installed anything. Not because a single district bought a scanner or hardened a door. Because the crowd was not there.

Nobody ran that as an experiment. It happened for reasons that had nothing to do with school safety. But it told us something we have otherwise never been able to test: the risk on Friday night is not attached to the building or the sport. It is attached to the gathering. Thousands of people, in the dark, in a space nobody designed to be controlled.

Which means it is a crowd management problem that we have been trying to solve with school security equipment. And those are not the same discipline at all.

Everything we bought is inside the building

I have spent eight years in this work. I have sat through more presentations about door hardware than any human being should have to. I know what a modern school security program actually consists of, because I have helped districts build them.

Hardened entry doors. Access control. Interior cameras. A weapons scanner at the front. Sometimes an AI system watching the hallway feeds. All of it built on one premise. There is a building, it has a perimeter, and we control who crosses it.

Now walk out to the stadium on Friday night.

The entry point is a folding table somebody carried out at five o'clock. The perimeter is a chain link fence with three gates propped open. There are four thousand people out there, or ten thousand, or fifteen thousand, spread across bleachers and a parking lot in the dark. Sightlines are blocked by the concession stand and by the crowd itself. Staffing is a fraction of what that attendance would justify literally anywhere else.

And every system we bought is two hundred yards away, powered on, watching an empty corridor.

I wrote recently about a district that spent more than a million dollars on an AI gun detection system that never saw the weapon in its own cafeteria. This is that same failure wearing a different costume. We keep buying protection for the shape of the threat we imagine, and the threat keeps showing up somewhere we were not looking.

Let me complicate my own argument

I have to be honest here, because if I am not, districts will go buy the wrong thing again and I will have helped them do it.

Most football game shootings are not targeted school attacks. They are not the pathway cases I have written about here, where a kid spends months descending through forums before he walks into a building. They are far more often a dispute between people who know each other, or a conflict that started somewhere else in the community, that follows the crowd into a venue where five thousand people happen to be standing.

That distinction matters enormously, because it means the answer is not more scanners.

A metal detector at one of three gates, staffed by a volunteer, on a night with six thousand attendees, mostly buys a district the feeling of having done something. I have watched districts buy that feeling. It costs a fortune and it protects nobody.

What actually works is unglamorous. Plan the season before the season.

One veteran school resource officer described twenty years at a school where games drew ten to fifteen thousand people. Every Friday afternoon his police chief called him with the same question. Twenty years, no shooting. He does not credit equipment. He credits conversations that happened months before the first kickoff, between the school and local public safety, about who is responsible for what.

Clear assignments for staff. Defined gates with a defined closing time. A real relationship with the local agency, built in July instead of negotiated at halftime. Some districts have moved games to neutral sites, played in daylight, or required that students attend with an adult.

None of it is expensive. None of it photographs well at a board meeting. All of it works better than the thing in the box.

The trade nobody wants to name

There is a cost question underneath this and I am going to put it in front of you plainly, because it is the same question I ask about every safety purchase.

Securing a football season properly, with sworn officers at every home game, can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single district. The researcher who maintains one of the largest school shooting databases in the country put it better than I can. That money could have paid for six full time therapists working with students all year long.

I do not think that means skip the officers. Friday night needs adults with authority present. I have other children. I would not send them to a game without them.

But every district has one pot of money, and the honest version of this conversation admits that a dollar spent responding is a dollar not spent preventing. If a district is going to spend heavily on game security, somebody should make that decision deliberately, with the tradeoff on the table, instead of reflexively in the week after something happens one county over.

Deliberate is the whole job. Deliberate is what nobody was on February 14.

There is a game this Friday. The band will be out on that field. Somebody's fourteen year old will be standing in the middle of it in a uniform his mother ironed that afternoon, playing for a crowd in line for nachos, having the time of his life.

I am not asking you to be afraid of that. I want those bleachers full. I want kids to have Friday nights.

I would give anything to complain about the parking one more time.

I am asking you to make three phone calls before kickoff.

For Alex. And for all of them.

Max Schachter

Those involved in the Bakersfield shooting are minors and are not named here. Learn more at schoolsafetydashboard.org.