For the third year in a row, an Oswego State professor is coordinating efforts to send out thousands of holiday cards to the families and communities affected by mass shootings.

Jaclyn Schildkraut, an associate professor of criminal justice at Oswego State and a national expert in mass shooting research, said she started sending holiday cards after the October 2017 shooting in Las Vegas.

“Right after the Las Vegas shooting, I got connected with one of the survivors who had connected with all of the families where children had lost parents and grandparents,” Schildkraut said. “Originally it started with me just adopting these three boys who had just lost their mother in the shooting.”

Schildkraut said her students requested extra credit that semester and she wanted them to do something meaningful.

“I said, ‘Okay, you can write cards to these three boys,’ and then I found out there was like 32 other kids who lost parents and grandparents,” Schildkraut said. “A couple of social media posts later, we collected 2,000 cards the first year.”

In 2018, Schildkraut expanded to other communities affected by mass shootings, including Aurora, Orlando, Newtown and Santa Fe, as well as her hometown of Parkland, Florida. With the help of volunteers, including students and organizations across North America, Schildkraut sent out over 10,000 cards in 2018 with one box of holiday cards weighing 76 pounds.

The list of communities Schildkraut sends cards to grows every year as more mass shootings occur, but adding her hometown was the hardest. The Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland was where Schildkraut’s brother and friends graduated and was the site of the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting.

“Last year was really difficult, having to add my own community. A place where I grew up, I’ve known it one way my entire life, for the most part, and all of a sudden it’s completely different,” Schildkraut said. “I can get that same feeling for these other communities that are going through it, where you stand in front of a building and it looks exactly the same as it’s always looked but it’s never the same again.”

Schildkraut said writing these cards helps her to be mindful of those who lost loved ones in a sudden and violent way while giving perspective to the writer. 

“I think it’s about doing something bigger than yourself,” Schildkraut said. “Here, by all intents and purposes, you had these very intact families, parents who were very loving to their children, they were loved spouses or sisters or brothers. I think there’s a relatability there to not necessarily put yourself in those shoes but to recognize that loss.”

The holidays especially can bring that feeling of loss to the fore.

 “I think when you lose somebody, you’ve always lost them. You have that feeling all year long but I think with the holidays it’s always a time for families and it highlights that loss even more,” Schildkraut said.

Last year, several members of the Oswego State community volunteered to write cards for Schildkraut’s “Cards for Kids” campaign. Professors enlisted their students to participate and the Oswego State men’s hockey team wrote cards with a box at the ice arena for fans to participate at the fall 2018 Whiteout Weekend.

“It’s impossible to fill the void in these individuals lives when one of their family members is taken in one of these shootings. However, you can try and ease some of the pain of that void,” Helen Knowles, a political science professor who had students write cards in class last year, said. “Anybody who’s lost a family member knows that that pain is intensified, magnified ten-fold, hundred-fold, during the holidays.”

Knowles said that Schildkraut’s work to send cards is important, as these small tokens sent from across the country during the holiday help these communities know that they are not forgotten amid the multiple mass shootings occurring every year.

With Schildkraut receiving several thousand cards last year, Knowles said she had no idea how Schildkraut manages to organize and ship every card on top of her job as a professor. Participating by writing cards and encouraging her students to do the same was a simple choice for Knowles.

“It just felt like the right thing to do. Everybody, from the youngest freshman on campus to the oldest faculty member, we’ve all lost someone and we all find ourselves missing that particular someone during a time of holiday,” Knowles said. “Whether it be to natural death or something as horrific as a mass shooting. We all feel that void and I think it’s just a humane thing to do.”

Knowles said the experience of writing cards was “humbling,” as she realized such a small token may make a difference in someone’s life.

With the prevalence of mass shootings in recent years, some Oswego State students have had relationships with school shootings before coming to college. 

“My school was almost in a mass shooting. When I was a sophomore, a kid brought a gun to school,” Nicole Evans, an Oswego junior who attended Indian River High School, said.

Evans said that the weapon and student were detained by a teacher before any violence started. But the incident showed her that schools do not always have an effective plan for avoiding danger and communicating an emergency to students. While Evans said she feels safe on campus, she does not feel prepared for an emergency.

“Do I know the school’s procedures if something were to happen? No,” Evans said. “I don’t know the campus’ plan if something were to happen. I don’t think most people on the campus do.”

The increase in mass shootings is deeply concerning to Erin McClary, a criminal justice student at Oswego State, as well as how quickly the nation seems to move on from those events.

“I think it’s crazy the mass shootings are happening in schools. It’s not even mainly in college campuses. A lot of them are elementary and high schools, adolescents that are growing and developing and those are the ones being killed by adults, and that’s scary,” McClary said. “It’s sad that this is where we’re at, this is where we’ve come to. There was just another shooting, and you hear about it on the news and, ‘Oh it’s just another shooting,’ why is that normalized? Why is that okay?”

For McClary, remembering communities impacted by mass shootings is important during the holidays, but the problem needs to be addressed year-round.

 “It’s very easy to move on and forget what they’ve been through because they have to live it every day. We don’t,” Schildkraut said. “I think it reminds them that there is good in the world, that there’s people who remember them and think about them.”

Photo provided by @CardsForKidsByJackie on Facebook