By 2004, “Degrassi: The Next Generation” had cemented itself as the television series that goes there ― with episodes on abortion, rape and other polarizing topics most teen shows wouldn’t dare approach. On Dec. 3 and 10 of that year, television network The N aired parts one and two of “Time Stands Still” in the United States. The episode featured the first school shooting on “Degrassi.”
The idea for the episode didn’t come out of the blue; it premiered only five years after one of the most infamous school shootings in America, the Columbine High School massacre of April 20, 1999. However, 20 years after the “Degrassi” episode aired, gun violence remains a top issue in American society. In fact, the “Time Stands Still” anniversary is not the only significant moment for 2024. In September, NBC News published an article announcing that the 2024 election would be the first year the first graders who survived the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting would be eligible to vote. As the article reports, states have passed hundreds of gun laws since then, but major federal bills have failed.
There have been at least 83 school shootings in 2024, according to CNN, which has been tracking these events through data reported by Gun Violence Archive, Education Week and Everytown for Gun Safety.
“There is never a good, right time to do a school shooting episode,” “Degrassi” producer Stephen Stohn told me. But the Columbine massacre shifted our culture, he said, raising questions like, “Is this becoming something that’s gonna just happen more and more, and why does this happen?”
“Time Stands Still” followed Rick Murray (Ephraim Ellis), a controversial character who was heavily bullied at Degrassi High — and at times was a bully himself. He decided to bring a gun to school to shoot Jimmy Brooks (Aubrey Graham, now known as rap superstar Drake), who ends up paralyzed from the waist down for the remainder of his time on the show.
In the episode, Jimmy joins Rick, Toby (Jake Goldsbie) and Emma (Miriam McDonald) in the trivia team’s “Whack Your Brain” competition. When Rick correctly answers the final question, making Degrassi the new champion, a bucket of yellow paint and feathers pours down on him during his celebratory moment. While the audience laughed, Rick reached his breaking point. The same afternoon, he went home and returned to Degrassi with a gun. After being led to believe Jimmy was behind the prank, Rick pulled the gun on his frenemy and shot him in the back.
It has always been a core “Degrassi” principle that nothing is black and white when it comes to storytelling, and Stohn and “Degrassi” co-creator Linda Schuyler were not going to forfeit these beliefs even when confronting an uncomfortable topic.
For the producers, it was crucial to intertwine the school shooting with a very humanizing story of bullying. Much of the storyline was inspired by Barbara Coloroso’s book, “The Bully, The Bullied, and The Bystander.” Coloroso, a Colorado native, was moved by the Columbine tragedy to write about the ecosystem at the school and how it influenced the shootings.
“It wasn’t just the shooter is an evil person,” Stohn said. “They’re part of an ecosystem, and they have feelings.” However, this doesn’t excuse Rick’s actions, Schuyler clarified; it only helped the viewer understand the root of his anger.
“That is not enough to excuse the act that followed,” Schuyler said. “We can be sympathetic to his baggage, but we cannot be sympathetic to his choice.”
The idea that bullying is a cause of school shootings is quite controversial. Srishti Bungle, the deputy editor of New York University’s independent newspaper, wrote that members of the LGBTQ+ community, students of color and kids with disabilities are among some of the most bullied in schools but do not make up the majority of school shooters. Since 1966, 97% of mass shooters have been men, and 56% have been white, the Violence Prevention Project reported.
However, some of the gunmen in recent school shootings have allegedly experienced bullying. After the shootings at Perry High School in Iowa in January, friends of the shooter, Dylan Butler, revealed he had been bullied for years. Colt Gray, the gunman behind the Apalachee High School shootings in Winder, Georgia, was also “ridiculed” by his classmates.
“Everybody who’s bullied does not end up killing somebody, but we do need to understand that as human beings, we’re not born with the idea that we’re gonna kill somebody. There has to be circumstances in your life that lead you to where it’s at that point,” Schuyler says.
Schuyler also believes that had Rick been caught earlier, he hopefully would have been put into therapy or counseling. She hopes that any kids in Rick’s position in the real world will be caught before causing future harm. In fact, a critical aspect of the “Degrassi” episode was the ways in which the school ignored the warning signs until it was too late.
There’s a key scene in “Time Stands Still” when Rick visits the school principal, Mr. Raditch (Dan Woods), to complain about Jimmy being put on the trivia team despite bullying him in the past. Instead of listening and considering Rick’s concerns, Mr. Raditch brushes him off. This led to a big decision, inspired by Coloroso’s work, to make changes to the school’s administration.
In her book, Coloroso was critical of the way that Columbine dealt with the aftermath of the school shooting. Schuyler reveals that Coloroso argued it was wrong for the school to go back to normal, upkeeping the social hierarchy and making no changes to the administration. Principal Frank DeAngelis remained in his position until his retirement in 2014, but “Degrassi” wanted to send a powerful message by removing Mr. Raditch from his position as principal.
“We cannot leave the school environment the way it was before the shooting,” Schuyler said.
However, it wasn’t only Mr. Raditch who acted as a bystander, but several others, including Jimmy himself. Spinner (Shane Kippel) was the character actually behind the humiliating prank on Rick. “Spinner is not exactly blameless in this entire episode,” Stohn said.
The character goes on to brag about his prank to Jimmy, and in an attempt to keep his friend out of trouble, Jimmy stays quiet. In the ultimate act of betrayal, Spinner and his friend Jay (Mike Lobel) blamed the prank on Jimmy. While Jimmy was the victim in the episode, he also played a role in the ecosystem. Things may have gone differently had he gone to the principal and turned Spinner in.
In reality, being a bystander has been just as detrimental in the real world as in the “Degrassi” episode, whether the bystander is simply watching bullying occur without standing up to it or failing to report crucial information. In the Michigan shooting at Oxford High School, Ethan Crumbley had told his mother he was seeing demons and ghosts in their house. He had also filmed himself torturing animals, and was obsessed with firearms and Nazi propaganda. None of this had been reported, according to NPR. The morning of the shooting, Crumbley’s parents were called in by a school guidance counselor, who then told them to seek counseling for their son or they would call child protective services. Crumbley’s parents refused to take their son home from school and did not inform authorities that they had recently purchased a gun for him.
Another major warning sign that went unchecked was Rick’s previous abusive behavior toward his former girlfriend, Terri MacGregor (Christina Schmidt). In the previous season, Rick entered a toxic relationship with Terri, which ended when Rick pushed her down and she hit her head on a rock, sending her into a coma. Yes, Rick was expelled as a result, but he was allowed to return the following year; the only repercussion was that he had to repeat 10th grade.
“If we’re going back, yeah, we would have done that a little bit smoother and better,” Stohn said. He adds that perhaps letting Rick back into the school contributed to Degrassi’s toxic ecosystem.
In the United States, it is not unusual for warning signs to go unrecognized. After the Columbine massacre, Randy and Judy Brown, parents of survivor Brooks Brown, filed a report stating that the shooter, Eric Harris, had threatened to kill their son and had confessed online to wanting to kill people. After the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings in Parkland, Florida, it was revealed shooter Nikolas Cruz was part of an Instagram group chat that spread racist, antisemitic and homophobic messages. In one message, he wrote, “shoot them in the back of the head,” referring to gay people.
In the “Degrassi” episode, Rick was easily able to obtain a gun by taking it from an unlocked box in his home. However, Stohn said this wasn’t necessarily a topic “Degrassi” was trying to cover. While it may be an important debate in the U.S., it’s a non-issue in Canada, where “Degrassi” was created and where there are much stricter gun laws.
“Obviously, killing somebody is bad, everybody accepts that, but whether Rick should have had such easy access to a gun, that wasn’t part of our storytelling or any kind of secret agenda,” Stohn said.
Adolescent school shooters of the past decades have mostly used guns taken from home, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics News. In the Oxford High School shootings, Crumbley used a gun his father, James, had bought him after James failed to properly secure the firearm. Both of Crumbley’s parents were later charged with involuntary manslaughter.
While “Degrassi” wasn’t trying to make a political statement around guns, Schuyler stands by a prominent statement she made in her 2022 book, “The Mother of All Degrassi: A Memoir.”
“The problem with a school shooting is that the whole premise is just wrong,” Schuyler wrote in a chapter titled “The Kids Are Alright.” “A gun in a building dedicated to youth and education? It’s wrong. A gun in the hands of a misguided youth? Wrong.”
In a 2018 White House listening session following the shootings in Parkland, Florida, former President Donald Trump suggested arming and training teachers was a potential solution to combat school shootings. Schuyler disagrees.
“How wrong is that?” she asks. “It’s just wrong with a gun being at school. It’s wrong that a kid that age should have access to it, and I know that the people who are advocates for guns are very vehement about it, and it just is wrong.”
Schuyler is also adamant that the average person should not be allowed to own an assault rifle.
“That should be a black and white; nobody, no civilian needs to be in possession of an assault weapon,” Schuyler said.
Twenty years since the episodes’ premiere, no president has done enough to prevent these shootings. Three months before the “Degrassi” episode aired, Congress chose not to reauthorize Bill Clinton’s Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994. While it received some criticism for its loopholes, the bill banned over a dozen specific firearms, prohibiting the manufacturing, transferring and possession of certain semi-automatic assault rifles.
President Joe Biden signed into law the first major gun safety legislation in almost three decades. During Trump’s previous term, the president-elect put a ban on bump stocks, a device that allows firearms to fire bullets more rapidly, and supported red flag laws, which prevent anyone considered a danger to themselves or others from access to guns. However, while speaking to the NRA in February regarding the Biden administration’s gun laws, Trump promised, “Under the Trump administration, all of those Biden disasters get ripped up and torn out my first week but maybe my first day in office.”
Mental health, an especially neglected area that’s also a key factor when discussing school shootings, was crucial to the “Degrassi” episode.
“We need more and more resources in that area,” Stohn admits. “With artificial intelligence coming in, it’s not gonna get any easier, and the mental health issues are just gonna get larger and larger.”
The mental health crisis is especially bad in America, where mental health disorders often go unchecked, and those in need of support struggle to find the money to pay for resources due to poor health care plans. Crumbley claimed through journal entries that he had “mental problems,” and while he wanted to get help, his parents wouldn’t listen to him.
“Your heart goes out to these families and these kids, and then it just sort of seems life goes on, and everybody talks about change with tears in their eyes, and we’re committed to it, and change doesn’t seem to happen,” Schuyler said.
In the “Degrassi” episode, Schuyler and Stohn wanted to especially emphasize what comes after the school shooting to showcase how the events impacted the community at large. The following “Degrassi” episode sees Sean Cameron (Daniel Clark), the character deemed a hero for shooting and killing Rick, cope with the incident. However, the school shooting most heavily impacted Jimmy. He was on track for a basketball scholarship, but the scene in which Jimmy attempts to run away from Rick before being shot in the back would be the last time he ever walked.
“Jimmy Brooks was never the same person again after that one nanosecond of a bad choice from Rick,” Schuyler said.
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Moving forward, Stohn and Schuyler said we need to have more conversations regarding mass shootings and gun safety in order to make change.
“More dialogue has to happen, and people have to be aware that the choices that they make have consequences, and they can be deadly,” Schuyler said.
This post was originally published on here
