Courtney Coleman had planned to pick up a shift as a substitute teacher at Silver Rail Elementary School on Thursday, Oct. 15. But her son needed her support, so she chose to stay home instead.

That afternoon, Coleman received a call: Droves of police officers were converging on a school in southeast Bend. She dashed that way, thinking it was her other son’s school.

But instead, police were going to Silver Rail, where a 16-year-old had opened fire on the special education program where he was once a student. Police say he killed three students and a teacher before a bystander fatally shot him.

Coleman had worked in that classroom before. She knew those kids.

“It’s actually a mixed emotional feeling,” said Coleman, her voice cracking. “I kind of wish I was there, but I’m also glad I wasn’t.”

The shooting has rattled the city’s sense of safety and resurfaced a long-simmering debate on how to prevent gun tragedies. But those working in the special needs community say it also underscores broader failures, and many wonder if the tragedy could have been prevented.

“Could we have done something different?” said Jenny Widder. She is the mother of a girl with autism who attended Silver Rail in the past, and works offering peer support to families. “And what did we miss?”

Much remains unknown, including the shooter’s motive, how he acquired the weapon and his own need for support growing up. Families said the shooter’s actions have shattered a community known for its deep care for children with special needs, many of whom cannot run, hide or fight.

To them, the shooting represents a nightmare coming true and raises questions about the meager resources to support families of vulnerable children, including the shooter.

“We let him down,” said Coleman, whose daughter has Rett syndrome, a genetic disorder. “There were things that he needed that he didn’t get. And by letting him down, we’ve then let all of the rest of these kids down.”

Former teacher says shooter was ‘failed by the system’

The shooter attended Silver Rail when he was younger and lived near the school with his mother, Shauntai Nickerson. She purchased the shotgun used in the shooting, a source told OPB.

Approached by a reporter outside her apartment on Wednesday, Nickerson declined to comment. She drove away in a U-Haul. His father has been homeless in Astoria for the past several years.

The district has provided limited information about the shooter’s experience as a student in Bend schools. But his mother previously spoke with the news outlet KTVZ about her son’s placement in a school program for children needing support for behavioral and social skills.

He was not enrolled in Bend-La Pine Schools at the time of the shooting, according to a district spokesperson, who declined to provide further details about his educational history, citing federal privacy laws. Investigators are now looking into his potential connection with violent online extremist groups, among other things related to the shooting, OPB reported.

In addition to the killing of a teacher and children aged 5, 8 and 11, authorities say a 7-year-old child and 54-year-old teacher were seriously injured. The tragedy is hitting the special needs community hard.

Karen Bures, who has worked for years in special education, taught the children directly affected and, years before that, the shooter. Bures emphasized that nothing could justify his actions, the grief and horror they have caused, but noted that he had serious mental health and behavioral needs and was “failed by the system.”

“I work really hard to stay connected to these kids, and I will have to sort of live knowing that I didn’t keep tabs on him, and I didn’t follow up,” Bures said. “I have no idea what happened to him in middle school or beyond, and that’s my culpability that I have to live with a little bit, too.”

Bures is the co-founder and executive director of BEAM, an afterschool nonprofit program housed in Silver Rail that supports children with special needs, such as autism, ADHD or Down syndrome. They include students who survived the shooting. She is seeking a new place to house the program “so that they can heal,” adding: “It’s just too soon for them to be there.”

Like many others, she’s weighing the many things that may have led up to the shooting. Often, she said, these students are “known for their hardest moments,” when a single thing they do could result in disciplinary actions and isolate them from their community.

“I think it is the most horrific moment of what can happen when kids lose connection, and when kids don’t have the resources and support that they need,” Bures said. She noted that “we all have responsibility in making sure that we are following these kids and supporting them all the way through in all of the different ways. And we have to work together so that it doesn’t happen again.”

Educators, parents see need for more special ed funding

Parents in Central Oregon and across the state have long advocated for more money for students with disabilities. In a state that struggles to adequately fund its schools, special education often gets further short-changed.

A number of states cap spending on special education, but Oregon has the lowest cap in the nation. Districts can only receive additional special education funding for up to 11% of students, even though about 15% of students have disabilities that qualify for that extra funding.

Providing special education services is expensive. Bend-La Pine Schools spends as much as $250,000 to educate some of its highest-need students, Superintendent Steve Cook told OPB as children returned to class on Wednesday. About 150 high-needs students in the district qualify for a financial reimbursement, which is 20 cents on the dollar, Cook said.

“We’ve been advocating for years that our special education funding is insufficient. I’m certain that this will bring attention to that,” Cook said.

“If somebody says it seems like those dollars are stretched thin, it’s not an inaccurate statement.”

The difficult job of working with children with disabilities is made all the more challenging by its insufficient pay, staffing and resources, said Leah Persichilli, who has worked extensively with disabled children during her 16 years in Bend.

A mother of two, she previously pulled her son, who has Down syndrome, out of Bend-La Pine Schools and connected him with a private learning specialist because she felt he wasn’t sufficiently supported. Supporting a child with high needs and limited resources is like “a house of cards,” she said

“At any point, one of those cards falls, and it can all fall,” Persichilli said.

Cook said the district is doing what it can with the resources it has, noting that the Silver Rail classroom where the shooting took place was staffed with four teachers for five kids.

“We’ll take every student that walks through the door, and so if a student has special needs we will meet those needs to the extent that we can,” Cook said.

To be sure, most children with disabilities are not violent, and many young offenders don’t have disabilities. People with disabilities are far more likely to be victims of violence than non-disabled people, according to federal crime statistics. But many who work with these children with disabilities are concerned that the shooting will carry a stigma.

“I worry about judgment,” said Persichilli. “I worry about parents not sending their kids to school, and not having other resources.”

Stigma and vulnerability worry parents of disabled children

Special education programs at schools like Silver Rail often serve medically fragile children, those who need one-on-one aid and help with behavioral and social skills. Some are not mobile. Others might have difficulty responding to directions, let alone following commands during an emergency.

“Those kids are sitting ducks,” said Widder, who is a peer support worker for Deschutes County, in addition to having a daughter with disabilities. “And that’s actually what a lot of my friends have been saying is, ‘You know, a lot of those kids are in wheelchairs, or they have walkers, and they’re not mobile.’”

When her daughter attended Silver Rail, Widder said it was “the newest, the best, and the safest school in Bend. I mean, it had the most security,” she said.

“I just felt really safe with her there,” Widder said. “So it’s just even more shocking to have this happen, especially at that school.”

In her job, she sees how families are struggling to get by and support their kids, especially in Bend, where the cost of living is high and supportive services are limited. As community members rally to provide support — through toy drives, letters, therapy, stuffed animals and more — Widder and many others are calling for resources to support struggling families.

“We somehow dropped the ball for this family,” Widder said.

For her part, Coleman is remembering the joy of working with the children at Silver Rail. Her job is intimate, helping with everything from diaper changes to feeding to supervising kids in small groups or a brief break outside.

“They own my heart,” Coleman said. “Every single one of them.”

“They are so grateful and so loving and so innocent and vulnerable,” she said. “I’m just a firm believer that the most enlightened among us are those with the hardest paths.”

Coleman is a peer support specialist who works with the High Desert Education Service District and also Treehouse Therapies, which supports young people with disabilities. On Wednesday, she returned to the classroom. She took a shift at R.E. Jewell Elementary School, her son’s school. It’s a five-minute drive from Silver Rail.

“We are going to have to demand change,” she said. “We have to do better for all of our kids.”

OPB reporters Erik Neumann and Troy Brynelson contributed reporting.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/10/22/bend-school-shooting-spotlights-pressures-on-families-children-special-needs/