To Each Of Us, A Mrs. Wright

There is little comfort in the news from Jonesboro, Arkansas, this day.

Two boys are accused of a gun attack at their middle school, where four students and one teacher died in the violence. In Jonesboro, as in any community touched by tragedy, the questions resound - and many of them will never be answered to anyone's satisfaction. How did this happen? What could we have done to stop it? What could we have done to PREVENT it?

And yet we take this time to pay tribute to one among the dead. Her name was Shannon Wright. According to police reports and the testimony of witnesses, Mrs. Wright, a sixth-grade English teacher at the Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, saw one of the shooters aiming at a girl student. Mrs. Wright interceded, protecting the child - and was killed instead. The girl has told others she has no doubt: Mrs. Wright saved her life, at the expense of her own.

Shannon Wright is being remembered today as a hero. She is also being remembered as a teacher. Somebody who wanted all her life to do exactly what she was doing, and where she was doing it. Teacher at Westside Middle School: that was her dream job, and she was living her dream.

It would be facile to say that to save a child's life is exactly what every teacher is supposed to do - and nobody wants America's teachers to NEED to go anywhere near such lengths in the pursuit of their professions.

Most of the debate you will hear for the next several days will focus on the violence, not the teaching: How to keep violence out of the classroom, how to keep our schools safe.

That is unquestionably the first, most pressing issue in this
case.

And yet the symbolism keeps coming back to this reporter. Shannon Wright saved a student's life. Shannon Wright was a teacher. And to be a teacher is to give a young person the tools with which to build a life. This reporter feels strongly about such things, not only because I studied at a teachers college, but also because I feel so strongly the debt I owe to my own teachers.

They never took a bullet for me. They were never called on to do so. It would be exaggerating to say they SAVED my life. And yet - they helped me make something of my life. Most American teachers are trying to do exactly that, every day, whether or not anybody ever notices.

Can you wonder that that's what Shannon Wright wanted to do with HER life? She was a hero - before she took that bullet.

Written by Dan Rather