by Clayton Franke, The Source – Bend, Oregon November 6, 2026
Even before a school shooting happened in Bend, Bethany Hillier had what she called intrusive thoughts when dropping her child off at school: It would be too easy for someone with ill intent to hop the fence and carry out a violent attack.
“As it turns out, these were not intrusive thoughts; they were my mind and body preparing me for what is a reality,” said Hillier, whose child is a 5th grader at Elk Meadow Elementary.
She was one of about 100 people who attended a community meeting hosted by Bend-La Pine Schools Thursday evening. For more than two hours, attendees — mostly parents — pressed district officials on a wide range of concerns including physical school safety, student mental health supports, special needs programs and the district’s communication to parents on Oct. 15, when a 16-year-old former student of Silver Rail Elementary shot his way into the school and fatally shot four people in a classroom.
Owen Mekkars, a fifth grader at Silver Rail Elementary, writes in sidewalk chalk at a memorial outside the school on Saturday, Oct. 17.
The Nov. 5 meeting was the second in a pair of community meetings the district hosted Wednesday and Thursday, the first of which was for parents of Silver Rail Elementary students, who still haven’t returned to school since the shooting. The district plans to reopen the school Nov. 12.
District officials, local law enforcement and representatives from the National Mass Violence Center fielded questions from the audience. Fear, frustration and an urgency to make schools safer pervaded Thursday’s discussion. But the district made it clear any new safety measures will cost money the district doesn’t have.
“Right now, there isn’t an easy answer,” Bend-La Pine Schools Superintendent Steve Cook said when asked about immediate ways to increase safety. “Whether it’s hardening facilities, whether it’s adding mental health supports, bringing in social work or more counselors, every one of those requires new funding. Period. That’s the conversation I think our community’s going to have to have.”
Hillier, the Elk Meadow parent, wondered if measures like a “panic” school alarm system or privacy film would have prevented loss of life on Oct. 15. Cook said there’s “not a magic wand” the district can wave to make schools perfectly safe. He talked about the district’s “layered” approach to safety, which includes locked vestibules at the front of every school, fencing and safer classroom door locks installed with money from a 2022 taxpayer bond.
That process took three years, Cook said.
He said the district has applied for about five federal grants to get funding for response to the shooting, but those could take about six months to come through.
At several points during Thursday’s meeting, district officials mentioned that school safety improvements will likely require a taxpayer bond or levy to raise money, in what would be a multi-year process to make upgrades across the district.
“The budget we get from the state does not have the resources to do any of these upgrades or hire SROs [School Resource Officers],” said Bend-La Pine Schools Board of Directors Chair Amy Tatom. “The conversation then becomes one with our community about bonds and levies.”
For some safety upgrades, the cost could be huge. Scott Bojanowski, director of safety at Bend-La Pine Schools, estimated that putting bulletproof glass at all 33 schools across the district could cost between $400 million and $600 million.
“Do we need to do some hardening or fortification of our schools? Maybe. Probably,” Bojanowski said. “But what does that look like?”
Cook said the district also plans to hire an outside investigator to conduct a review of the shooting to evaluate “every single decision, every action that was taken by the school district.”
This article first appeared on The Source – Bend, Oregon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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