CMS superintendent defends response to fatal shooting at Butler High School

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Superintendent Clayton Wilcox strongly defended the actions of Butler High School administrators after a student fatally shot another student in the school Monday morning.

At Tuesday night’s Board of Education meeting, Wilcox said the school’s principal “made a brave decision” — and the correct one — to send students to their “second hour” of classes and not home on buses.

“For those who think we were callous, I would simply say you are wrong,” Wilcox said.

Bobby McKeithen, a 16-year-old sophomore, was shot in a hallway during what police said was a fight with another student.

Jatwan Craig Cuffie, a 16-year-old freshman, was charged with first-degree murder.

Wilcox previously said the incident “began with bullying that escalated out of control, and as fear took over, a young person brought a gun to solve the problem,” The Charlotte Observer previously reported.

On Tuesday night, Wilcox told the board that “we were not continuing on with school as normal” when students were sent to their second hour of classes.

That decision allowed administrators to “know where (students) would be,” Wilcox told the board.

No instruction took place in the second hour, he added.

He said it was better to keep students in school than to send them home when many parents were still at work.

Still, Wilcox told the board, the shooting highlighted the need for improvement on CMS’s part.

“We are now looking at the hard road ahead, and we know when you point a finger at somebody else, there are three pointing back at you,” he said.

“We weren’t clear enough in our wording to settle parents down,” the superintendent told the board.

The district notified parents of the shooting about an hour after it happened, and “CMS said no one would be allowed on campus until the lockdown has been lifted by law enforcement,” the Observer previously reported.

WSOC, however, reported that angry parents were gathering around the campus despite being told to congregate elsewhere.

Without elaborating, Wilcox told the board Tuesday night: “We had some access issues, and we’ll work through those in the days ahead. We met today with the Matthews Police Department, and we are refining all the security plans we presented last week. We have some access control issues we didn’t know we had before.”

“We have a lot of work to do as a school system, and we will get it done over time,” Wilcox told the board.

This story was originally published October 30, 2018 at 8:57 PM with the headline "CMS superintendent defends response to fatal shooting at Butler High School."