WRITTEN BY: Charlie Tierney, Steve Cottle & Katie Jorgensen

Wind back the clock to 1971. Jane, a freshly minted college graduate, joins the government as a clerk. Jane’s work consists largely of entering information into databases and creating reports, which requires her to spend the better part of her work day seated at a terminal near a mainframe computer that fills an entire room. Jane and her colleagues are expected to be at their desks from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week. Jane is grateful to have a steady 9-to-5 job, and plans to spend her entire career with her agency.

Flash forward 40 years and meet Jane’s grandson, Ian. He carries a slim tablet wherever he goes, which has more computing power than the mainframe with which Jane worked. Ian is constantly tethered to the Internet and works 24/7, from wherever he is. Ian expects to switch from project to project and office to office as his career develops and his interests evolve. If he feels he has reached the limit of his ability to learn or grow in one role, he will look elsewhere for a new opportunity. What if the government could supply Ian the opportunities and experiences he seeks?

The GovCloud concept proposed in this paper would restructure government workforces in a way that takes advantage of the talents and preferences of workers like Ian, who are entering the workforce today. The model is based on a large body of research, from interviews with public and private sector experts to best practices from innovative organizations both public and private.

This report details trends in work and technology that offer significant opportunities for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the government workforce. It lays out the GovCloud model, explaining how governments could be organized to take advantage of its flexibility. It examines how work would be performed in the new model and discusses potential changes to government HR programs to support GovCloud. Other sections provide resources for executives, including a tool to help determine cloud eligibility, steps they can take to pilot the cloud concept, and future scenarios illustrating the cloud in action.

The GovCloud model represents a dramatic departure from the status quo. It is bound to be greeted with some skepticism. Without such innovation, however, governments will be left to confront the challenges of tomorrow with the workforce structure of yesterday. The details of the GovCloud model are open for debate. The purpose of this paper is to jumpstart that debate.

HOW WE WORK TODAY—AND TOMORROW

Forty years ago, more than half of employed American adults worked in either blue-collar or clerical jobs. Today, less than 40 percent work in these same categories, and the share continues to shrink.¹ Jobs requiring routine or manual tasks are disappearing, while those requiring complex communication skills and expert thinking are becoming the norm.² Increasingly, employers seek workers capable of creative and knowledge-based work.

The next generation of creative knowledge workers has already entered the job market. These “Millennials” came of age in a rapidly and radically changing world. They are the first true digital “natives.” They have grown up with instant access to information through technology. As such, Millennials have considerably different expectations for the kind of work they do and the information they use. The pursuit for variety in work has led Millennials to cite simply “needing a change” as their top reason for switching jobs.³

Advances in technology have also  changed the actual ways in which people perform work. The ability to crowdsource tasks is one example of this change. Since its founding in 2001, volunteers have produced and contributed to over 19 million articles in 281 languages on Wikipedia.⁴ Built around this concept, a burgeoning industry is developing around “microtasking,” dividing work up into small tasks that can be farmed out to workers. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, rolled out in 2005, allows users to post tasks to a platform where registered workers can accept and complete them for a small fee. When this paper was written, more than 195,000 tasks were available on Mechanical Turk.⁵

Such technologies may offer suitable possibilities for the public sector. Microtask, a Finnish cloud labor company, maintains Digitalkoot, a program that helps the Finnish National Library convert its image archives into digital text and correct existing errors. It does so with volunteered labor; participants simply play a game in which they are shown the image of a word and then must type it out to help a cartoon character cross a bridge. In doing so, they are turning scanned images into searchable text, greatly improving the search accuracy of old manuscripts.⁶ At present, more than 100,000 people have completed over 6 million microtasks associated with this project.⁷

As the pace of computing power and machine learning increases, professors Frank Levy and Richard Murnane contend that more tasks will move from human to computer processing.⁸ Skeptics need look no further than IBM’s Watson, a computer that can answer questions posed in natural language. In February 2011, Watson defeated two all-time champions of the quiz show Jeopardy! This was not solely a publicity stunt; IBM hopes to sell Watson to hospitals and call centers to help them answer questions from the public.⁹

Around the globe, more and more governments are looking to increase telework among employees. In 2010, the U.S. government passed legislation calling for more telework opportunities for government employees. Likewise, the Australian government, in order to attract and retain information and communications technology workers, instituted a teleworking policy in 2009 requiring agencies to implement flexible work plans.¹⁰ Other countries, including Norway and Germany, are also focusing on flexible work arrangements to Improve public sector recruiting.¹¹ In Canada, the government has an official telework policy that recognizes “changes are occurring in the public service workforce with a shift towards more knowledge workers,” and “encourages departments to implement telework arrangements.”¹²

Source: Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 50.

Figure 1: Trends in routine and non-routine tasks in the U.S. 1960-200213

These are all powerful steps in the right direction for employees whose natural work rhythms are not locked into “9 to 5.” Some companies have taken telework one step further. British Telecom is pushing the concept of “agile working” through its Workstyle Project, where employees decide what work arrangements best suit them—rather than a rigid definition by location and hours. BT Workstyle is one of the largest flexible working projects in Europe, with over 11,000 home-based workers. BT has found that its “home-enabled” employees are, on average, 20 percent more productive than their office-based colleagues.¹⁴

Similarly, U.S. electronics retailer Best Buy experimented with a “Results Only Work Environment” (ROWE). In a ROWE, what matters is not whether employees are in their office, but rather that they complete their work and achieve measurable outcomes. In a ROWE, salaried employees must put in as much time as is actually needed to do their work—no more, no less.

The decline in routine and manual tasks and the rise of new ways of working is not isolated to the private sector. In 1950, the U.S. federal workforce largely comprised clerks performing repetitive tasks. About 62 percent performed these tasks, while only 11 percent performed more “white-collar” work. By 2000, those relationships were reversed. Fifteen percent performed repetitive tasks, compared to 56 percent in the white-collar categories.¹⁶ Similarly, in 1944, the number of workers in the UK civil service considered “industrial” totaled 505,000. By 2003, this number fell to 18,200, with “non-industrial” workers reaching 538,000 in 2004.¹⁷ And in Canada, in 2006, knowledge-based workers represented 58 percent of federal workers in the Core Public Administration, up from 41 percent 11 years earlier.¹⁸

The swelling ranks of “non-industrial” government workers indicate a shift in public sector jobs toward creative, collaborative, and complex work. The workforce structure, however, designed for clerks of the last century, remains largely the same. With limited flexibility to distribute resources, governments often address change by creating new agencies and programs. This can be seen following major events like the outbreaks of the Avian flu and SARs in the past decade, 9/11, and the financial crisis of 2008.

Source: United States Office of Personnel Management, A Fresh Start for Federal Pay: A Case for Modernization (April 2002), p. 5. http://www.opm.gov/strategiccomp/whtpaper.pdf

Figure 2: The changing U.S. federal workforce 1950–200015

Given increasing budgetary pressures and burgeoning national debts, the conventional model of creating new agencies or permanent structures in response to new challenges is unsustainable. This is exacerbated by our inability to accurately predict future needs and trends. Consider a 1968 Business Week article proclaiming that “the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself,” or the president of Digital Equipment Corporation, who in 1977 said, “[t]here is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”¹⁹

The world is full of experts who attempt to predict the future—and fail.²⁰

Instead of endeavoring to predict the future, governments can choose to create a flexible workforce that can quickly adapt to future work requirements. To accomplish this, the  government can learn from a game-changing concept in the technology world: cloud computing.

Major organizations and small startups alike increase their flexibility by sharing storage space, information, and resources in a “cloud,” allowing them to quickly scale resources up and down as needed. Why not apply the cloud model to people? The creation of a government-wide human cloud could provide significant benefits, including:

• The ability to apply resources when and where they are needed
• Increased knowledge flow across agencies and a new focus on broad, government-wide missions
• A reduction in the number of permanent programs
• Fewer structures that stifle creativity and interfere with the adoption of new technologies and innovations

A cloud-based government workforce or “GovCloud” could include workers who perform a range of creative, problem-focused work. Rather than being slotted into any single government agency, cloud workers would be true government-wide employees.

BREAKING UP BUREAUCRACIES

This section outlines the organizational structure of the GovCloud model, which rests on three main pillars: a cloud of government workers, thin executive agencies, and shared services.

The cloud

Most government workforce models tend to constrain workers by isolating them in separate agencies.

Consider the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the United Kingdom and the subsequent slaughter of more than 6 million pigs, sheep, and cattle. The problem of an impacted food supply is complicated. In most countries, multiple agencies focus on agriculture, food production, and public health. In the United Kingdom, the army and even tourism ministries were impacted by the outbreak as agencies became overwhelmed by the number of animals in need of disposal and by the cordoning off of tourist areas to prevent the spread of the disease.Yet the structure of government agencies often confines employees to work in information silos, creating inherent operational inefficiencies. In a cloud workforce model, experts in each area could be pulled together to support remedies and propose coordinated corrective measures.

The FedCloud model

The GovCloud model could become a new pillar of government, comprising permanent employees who undertake a wide variety of creative, problem-focused work. As needed, the GovCloud model could also take advantage of those outside government, including citizens looking for extra part-time work, full-time contractors, and individual consultants.

Cloud workers would vary in background and expertise but would exhibit traits of “free-agent” workers—self-sufficient, self-motivated employees who exhibit a strong loyalty to teams, colleagues, and clients. Daniel Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, argues that 33 million Americans—one-quarter of the workforce— already operate as free agents.²²

According to the white paper, “Lessons of the Great Recession,” from Swiss staffing company Adecco, contingent workers—those who chose non-traditional employment arrangements²³—are expected to eventually make up about 25 percent of the global workforce.²⁴These more autonomous workers, according to Pink, are better suited to 21st-century work, and are more productive—even without traditional monetary incentives.²⁵

Benefits of the cloud

The fluid nature of the cloud can provide significant benefits:

• Knowledge exchange: Avoids “trapping” knowledge within any single agency. The fluidity of the cloud allows for the quick connection of knowledge with the people who need it.
• Adaptability: Allows the government to concentrate resources where needed. The cloud would make federal work more adaptable and focused on cross-cutting outcomes.
• Collaboration: Encourages collaboration, whether in person or virtually, through the expanded use of video conferencing, collaborative tools, and electronic communication.
• Focus resources: Teams can be formed quickly and dissolved when their work is concluded, reducing the likelihood of government structures continuing to operate after they are no longer needed.²⁶

The nature of the cloud—teams forming and dissolving as their tasks require—encourages workers to focus on specific project outcomes rather than ongoing operations.

The need to support some ongoing missions will remain, of course. These missions will be carried out by thin agencies.

Under the cloud concept, federal agencies would remain focused on specific missions and ongoing oversight. These agencies, however, would become “thinner” as many of their knowledge workers transfer into the cloud. Thin agencies could also create opportunities to streamline organizations with overlapping missions.

Employees working in thin agencies could fall into two main categories:

• Mission specialists: These are subject matter experts who possess knowledge central to the mission of the agency or tied to one geographic location. Examples include agency executives, policy experts, and others with knowledge that is closely aligned with the mission of a specific agency (e.g., foresters, tax code specialists). Mission specialists also could enter the cloud, based on the specific needs of other agencies.
• Frontline workers: These are employees who represent the “face” of government to citizens—law enforcement officers, investigators, regulators, entitlement providers, etc.—and who interact with citizens on a regular basis. As the nature of frontline work typically does not lend itself to the cloud, these employees would still align with individual agencies.

GovCloud could change the highest levels of public sector workers as we know them today. The Senior Executive Service in the United States, Permanent Secretaries and Directors General in the United Kingdom and Australia—all such senior officials could rotate between agencies, shared services, and the cloud, which would reflect the original intent behind many of these high-level offices: giving executives a breadth of experience in roles across government to help develop shared values and a broad perspective. An important benefit of rotation would be the ability to tap into cloud networks to assemble high-performing teams.

To further focus agencies on specific missions, many of their back-office support functions could be pulled into government-wide shared service arrangements.

The use of shared services in government has come and gone in waves—usually dictated by fiscal necessity. Most countries in Europe, as part of their e-government strategies, have placed increased focus of late on developing shared services, whether through an executive agency or a CIO, as well as working with EU coordination activities. And while the decentralized governments of some EU countries—such as Germany—make shared services more difficult, these countries are using states and agencies to pilot innovative approaches.²⁷

Other efforts around the world include the U.S e-Government Act of 2002, which examined how technology could be used to cut costs and Improve services. More recently, the New Zealand government appointed an advisory group in May 2011 to explore public sector reform to Improve services and provide better value. In their report, “Better Public Services,” the advisory group recommended the use of shared services to Improve effectiveness in a variety of government settings, including policy advice and real estate.²⁹ Following up on this, three New Zealand agencies—the Department of the Prime Minister, the State Services Commission, and the Treasury—announced in December 2011 that they would share such corporate functions as human resources and information technology.³⁰ And though shared services in Western Australia were shut down, other projects in South Australia are moving ahead and already showing savings.³¹

While the idea of using shared services is not a novel one, it is central to the GovCloud model. The GovCloud model envisions building upon effective practices and those shared services already in operation to deliver services like human resources, information technology, finance, and acquisitions government-wide. Workers in these shared services would include subject matter experts in areas like human resources and information technology, as well as generalists, who support routine business functions.

The potential for shared services continues to grow. As seen with IBM’s Watson and Microtask’s Digitalkoot, new technologies provide an opportunity to accelerate the automated delivery of basic services. Some agencies already have begun capitalizing on these trends. For example, NASA has moved its shared service center website to a secure government cloud, facilitating greater employee self-service and helping to reduce demand on finite call center resources.³²

WHO BELONGS IN THE CLOUD?

This decision tool is designed to help leaders determine which employees are appropriate for each of the three structures in the GovCloud model—the cloud, thin agencies, and shared services.

To the cloud…

GovCloud Project Lifecycle

REINVENTING HR

Managing employees in the cloud will require governments to reinvent human resource management. Individual and team performance evaluations, career development, pay structures, and benefits and pensions would need to change to support GovCloud. This section examines possibilities for HR reinvention, including performance management, career development, workplace flexibility, and benefits.

Performance and career management

Employees working in the cloud would require an alternative to determine pay and career advancement. The government could take its cues from the gaming world and evaluate cloud workers with a point system.

An HR management system that incorporates the accumulation of experience points (XP) through effective work on cloud projects, training, education, and professional certifications could replace the tenure-centric models for cloud employees.

As employees accumulate XP, they could “level up” and take on additional responsibilities in future projects. Workers in the cloud could earn XP in four ways:

• Education and training: Employees earn XP based on advanced degrees, continuing education courses, and professional certification.
• Social capital: Employees could earn XP with high social capital scores based on their participation in GovCloud collaboration and networking.
• Leadership: taking on additional leadership responsibilities in cloud teams could raise individual XP scores.
• Projects: Projects in the cloud could be worth a certain number of XP, based on their scope and complexity and team performance. Project managers could award additional XP based on employee level, individual performance, and peer evaluation.

Just as XP could be gained through learning new skills, it could be lost in the following three ways:

• Failure to apply skills: Workers could earn XP for training, but lose these points if they do not use the resulting skills on projects.
• Down time: One would expect some cloud employees to be between projects at any given time, and indeed this provides the capacity to surge when demands require. That said, employees who spend too much time away from project work could lose XP.
• Poor project performance: Employees who receive less-than-satisfactory ratings on individual performance reviews, peer evaluations, or team performance could lose XP.

Salary and benefits

Any serious discussion about creating a new class of government employees requires a fresh look at employee benefits and compensation. For example, XP could be used to help determine workers’ salaries, but additional research into alternative pension and benefit programs is needed. While any discussion on compensation could be contentious, a healthy debate among stakeholders from across the government should be welcomed.

Career paths

As new roles emerge in the cloud, so too could new career paths. Career emphasis could move away from time served in a particular pay grade and toward milestones that are meaningful for employee development.

Each worker may have different career aspirations. For instance, not all workers aspire to management; some may seek to master a particular subject area instead. Career advancement in the cloud would not equate to moving up a ladder, but rather moving along a lattice.

Lattice GovCloud Model

Here’s how the lattice could work for Ian, who we met in the introduction.

• The early years: A few years after being hired into the human resources shared service straight out of school, Ian has been exposed to a wide variety of agencies. Through these interactions, he realizes he has become passionate about the field of social work.
• Seeking a change: Ian decides to leave federal service and pursue a master’s degree in social work, and then take a job at his state’s social services agency. After a few years, Ian accepts a position as director of a mid-sized non-profit.
• Returning to GovCloud: After years of running the non-profit, Ian begins thinking about government service again. He decides to join GovCloud by working just a few hours a week. After working part-time on projects that require social work experience, Ian decides to return full-time. To more effectively manage social programs, Ian seeks out all the performance measurement training he can find.
• Finding a niche: Ian becomes well versed in performance measurement, first for social programs, but he quickly learns how to apply those concepts elsewhere. When his social work experience isn’t needed, he can also lend performance measurement knowledge from the cloud.
• Winding down: As he nears retirement, Ian wants to help train the next generation of social workers by teaching one course per semester at a local university. However, he is able to remain connected to GovCloud and spend one or two days a week working with social programs and measuring the performance of other projects.

Learning

It is unlikely that all workers will thrive in the new GovCloud environment right out of the gate. As such, it would be important to assess a worker’s readiness before placing her in GovCloud and providing training on core competencies critical to cloud success. There could also be opportunities to start workers, especially those at earlier stages of a career, within an agency or shared service to build up expertise in some area before “graduating to the cloud.” Once in the cloud, new workers could be paired with mentors, who are more experienced, to help navigate the cloud experience itself.

There should be an emphasis on continuous learning in the cloud. It would be important for cloud workers to continue to refine their skills, develop additional expertise, and adapt to new ways of working. Not only could continuous learning affect workers’ career mobility by increasing the depth and breadth of their skills, but it could also impact their salary and level by increasing their XP.

Learning and development in the cloud could take on many themes of “next learning.” Next learning focuses on creating personalized learning experiences that leverage the latest technologies and collaborative communities to deliver education and learning programs that build knowledge bases and promote learning as a focus and passion, not just a checkbox in a career.³⁶

To broaden cloud worker skills and the ability to handle multiple tasks and work on a variety of projects, cloud learning could include the following principles:³⁷

• Video: The use of video learning could bring an in-person feel to trainings for cloud workers. Further, it could allow for more meaningful mentor relationships, even over long distances. This is an important component of a highly virtual workplace.
• Social and collaborative learning: Use the wisdom of the cloud (and beyond) to create a collaborative learning environment.
• Learning projects: In an environment where cloud workers are completing microtasks or participating in projects, design training to reflect this, helping to hone collaboration and other skills that will be important in the cloud.
• Learning and leading in a distributed workplace: Workers who ascend to positions of leadership will need more than the traditional essentials of leadership to get them there. They will need to learn how to motivate and manage employees in a distributed environment, which requires an emphasis on communication, accountability, trust, and performance.
• Building knowledge bases and connectivity for learning:Elective knowledge management will be critical in the Gov Cloud environment. This is just as important for training as for project information. Make knowledge gained in one area available elsewhere by tagging and promoting content for others to see. This can complement social learning by allowing users to bookmark or promote effective learning channels.

Workplace flexibility

In the cloud, careers and expertise will be built in new ways and work will be something we do, rather than a place we go to. As such, the cloud will supply workers more control over their schedules and workloads. By creating a flexible workplace, governments could shed a significant amount of physical infrastructure and create shared workspaces. Many buildings could be converted into co-located spaces; teams could use collaboration spaces or videoconferencing centers.

Some workers might rarely set foot in a government building, instead conducting cloud tasks at home and interacting with project teams virtually. With advancing communications and mobile technology, distance no longer hinders collaboration. It no longer matters whether all workers are at an office between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.; what matters is whether project teams produce results and whether everyone contributes.

A more flexible workplace could also take advantage of resources governments might not otherwise have access to. Some retiring workers may not want to quit working altogether, and a flexible model could be an enticing way to keep their expertise on retainer. Alternatively, the model could take advantage of would-be government employees unwilling to relocate or unable to work a regular schedule. By increasing flexibility, governments could increase their available resource pool, allowing agencies to access the skills and knowledge they need, when they need it. For an example of how a retiree could interact with the cloud, see Appendix C: National Security Case Study.

TAKING THE FIRST STEPS

Creating the GovCloud model will require bold leadership and the ideas and initiatives of entrepreneurial executives. While a GovCloud model may be years in the making, agencies can begin adopting cloud concepts today.

• Build collaboration spaces: Make interoffice collaboration easier. Create physical spaces in your office where employees can casually spend time sharing information across departments. Provide employees with several hours per week to devote to collaborative efforts with other areas of the agency that interest them.
• Rotate your people: Embrace the Millennials’ aptitude for change. Create a rotational program that allows staff members to work across departments and specialties. As your organization realizes the value of a broader perspective, you can pursue rotation among agencies or even secondments (rotations between the nonprofit, private, and public sectors).
• Start a volunteer cloud: Plant the seeds for the cloud by allowing workers to seek tasks beyond their current responsibilities. Start by providing a platform for managers to post issues or problems they need help in solving. Allow employees to help with projects or tasks that interest them. This will allow them to expand their networks, build new skills,   and chase their passions.
• Pilot a GovCloud: Only experience will bring people to understand the power of the cloud. A few agencies could bring the cloud to life by moving resources to a pilot cloud workforce. This would allow them to document lessons learned and determine the viability of the cloud on a wider scale. Use the GovCloud decision tree to help determine who could thrive in the cloud.

Implementing GovCloud

The GovCloud concept is designed to be versatile as well as applicable to a wide range of entities. Depending on your organization, government executives wishing to employ GovCloud may choose to apply the concept first to a unit, before expanding to other branches or divisions, entire agencies, or the whole of government.

Often, GovCloud principles are most effectively implemented as part of a larger reform program within a particular agency—as with the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ Renew program, as described earlier in this report. On a smaller scale, the UK Cabinet Office used flexible resourcing (FR) in its Economic Reform Group (ERG), with a staff of about 400, as part of its cost-reduction plans. Using a simple database that it had developed and a strong program of communications, FR is now used and embraced by all core ERG employees, with strong, clear ownership from the top—another key implementation factor. Says Ian Watmore, the UK Cabinet Office’s former permanent secretary, FR means “we are able to deploy people much more quickly to priority projects.”⁴⁰

Figure 3 outlines how GovCloud can apply to a variety of organizations.

THE ROAD AHEAD

Most government workforces haven’t undergone a broad restructuring in decades. In that time, the world has been transformed by computers, the Internet, and mobile communications.

To respond to a variety of challenges, governments have created scores of new organizations. However, in today’s world of budget cuts and increased fiscal scrutiny, the constant creation of new, permanent structures is not sustainable.

The GovCloud model could offer a new way to use government resources. A cloud of government-wide workers could coalesce into project-based teams to solve problems and separate when their work is done. This could allow governments to concentrate resources when and where they are needed. By using this model in conjunction with thinner agencies and shared services, governments can reduce back-office redundancies and let agencies focus on their core missions.

This model capitalizes on the work preferences of Millennials—the future government workforce—who value career growth over job security or compensation.⁴¹ The GovCloud model allows employees to gain a variety of experiences in a shorter amount of time and to self-select their career direction.

To support GovCloud, governments could establish the processes by which cloud teams would form, work, and dissolve. New ways to evaluate performance and help workers gain skills and build careers should be considered. Today’s employee classification system stresses job descriptions and time in service; this could be transformed with an XP model that emphasizes the individual’s ownership of his or her career.

The GovCloud model will undoubtedly be controversial. Many stakeholders, from governing bodies to public employee unions, must weigh in to shape the future government workforce. The transition to a cloud model will not happen overnight or maybe even in the next five years, but the conversation starts today.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Charlie Tierney

Charlie Tierney is a Manager in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Federal Human Capital Practice and a former GovLab Fellow. He has served clients in the intelligence community. He graduated from the University of Kansas with a BA in Chinese History and minor in Mandarin, and is currently pursuing his Masters in Business Administration at the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business.

Steve Cottle

Steve Cottle was a GovLab Fellow and a Senior Consultant in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Federal Strategy & Operations practice. There, he served multiple clients within the Department of Homeland Security. Steve graduated from Boston College with a BA in International Studies and German and received a Fulbright Grant to study international security in Germany. Steve is currently pursuing his Masters in Public Policy at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute.

Katie Jorgensen

Katie Jorgensen was a GovLab Fellow and Consultant in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Federal Strategy & Operations practice. There, she served multiple clients in the Federal Railroad Administration and Transportation Security Administration. Katie received her BA in American Studies from Georgetown University. Katie is currently pursuing her Masters in Business Administration at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

Originally published by Deloitte University Press on dupress.com. Copyright 2015 Deloitte Development LLC.

Assessing students’ preparedness before your course begins and at the course outset  

The COVID-19 pandemic and social upheaval have influenced students’ learning contexts and contributed toward uncertainties related to the knowledge, skills, and experiences students have acquired. Access this resource for feasible ways to diagnose any gaps in students’ preparation, point students to useful resources, and make informed decisions about course design, instruction, and program milestones.

STUDENT PREPAREDNESS RESOURCE.

Direct Measures for Assessing Student Learning

Formative Assessment

Grading and Rubrics

Assessing Specific Types of Assignments

Self and Peer Assessment

Equity and Assessment

Indirect Measures for Assessing Student Learning

See Evaluating Courses and Instruction on our Teaching Strategies & Materials website.

Classroom Assessment Techniques

Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) offer a means to generate quick ungraded feedback about student learning and instruction. Depending on their purpose, they might be used to assess:

• prior knowledge, recall and understanding
• students’ awareness of their attitudes and values
• skill in analysis and critical thinking
• students’ self-awareness as learners
• skill in application and performance
• learner reactions to class activities, assignments and materials 

Common cats include: one minute paper, the muddiest point, pre-knowledge check, mid-session check, and in-class polls. For more examples and descriptions of CATs see the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching Resource on CATs

References:

Cross, K. P., & Angelo, T. A. (1988). Classroom Assessment Techniques. A Handbook for Faculty.

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Providing feedback

Sharing feedback one or more times during the course, rather than only at the end, can provide students with a motivating sense of progression. Feedback can be important for reinforcing successes and, in opportunities for growth or correction, it can help students understand not simply that they did something wrong but also (a) where and how they got off course and/or (b) how feedback is a valuable resource in many contexts, such as writing, design, etc. Providing feedback only at the end of a course can lead students to compare themselves simply to their peers rather than have a sense of their own learning trajectory and potential.

Some instructors hold individual meetings with students to share their standards and expectations, and address the degree to which the student is meeting them. These conversations can also allow students to define and measure their work against their personal objectives for the course and serve as opportunities to reflect on what tangible next steps they can take in order to progress. In this way, these conversations can be a backdrop for students to take ownership of their learning.

Finally, feedback can focus exclusively on the assignment at hand, or it can be used more expansively to address a student’s larger educational context and development.

References:

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of educational research, 77(1), 81-112.

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Grading strategies

Instructors will want to think about whether their grading strategies are reliable, valid, fair, transparent, and that what they are assessing aligns with the stated learning objectives.  Ideally, the percentages and criteria for each assessment will be clearly conveyed to the students on the course syllabus and/or in other materials, such as assignment descriptions.

While grading practices may vary across disciplines and departments, there are a few points instructors might wish to keep in mind:

• Provide students with choice in the assignment, or on what questions they need to answer on an exam (e.g. answer two out of three questions) tends to enhance motivation, and may allow students to demonstrate more readily what they have learned
• Align assessments with learning objectives. For example, if a learning objective focuses on students developing critical thinking skills, but students only take exams that focus on recall, than there is a mismatch between the kind of thinking the instructor wants from his or her students, and the kind of thinking that is actually being elicited in the assessment.
• Vary the types of assignments (exams, projects, homework etc) to enhance motivation and persistence, using both formative and summative assessments
• Distribute the overall grade percentages across multiple assessments
• Weight assessments appropriately in terms of percentage of grade as well as time on task.  For example, more important assignments should be weighted more heavily
• Offer constructive feedback on student work in a timely way.
• Break large projects into smaller components, with each component being assigned a specific percentage (for example, a final presentation might include literature review, outline, first draft, and oral presentation)

In addition to using grading rubrics, instructors who are teaching with someone else (another instructor, or teaching assistants) might find it useful to employ:

• Double-Marking: In this case, each grader reviews the work independently of the other[s], separately making decisions about the quality of the work (focusing on specific criteria). After each grader has had the chance to grade the work, the two share their decisions and discuss points of agreement and disagreement, in order to achieve consensus. This is especially important when instructors want to emphasize holistic evaluation of a single product or assignment to demonstrate, for example, that certain skills (such as writing, critical thinking, problem-solving) are an inherent and inseparable part of the finished achievement.
• Pooled Marking: Here, all individuals involved with grading student work sit together, and determine the quality of a demo of student work together.  This method may be particular useful for an instructor working with several teaching assistants, so that the TAs are clear about what each criterion entails. The goal of this activity is to calibrate all graders at once. In large classes, pooled grading can be done for a demo of student work, and then each grader can work with a subset of the exam responses, papers, or other student products.

Using rubrics to assess learning

A rubric is a tool designed to:

• assess complex learning criteria consistently and objectively, whether there’s just one grader or multiple graders;
• measure student progress over time;
• have a concrete reference point for sparking teacher-student dialogue about performance expectations and areas for improvement.

The analytical scoring rubric is the most common form of rubric.  An analytic rubric allows the user to understand the degree to which an outcome is being fulfilled, as opposed to providing a simple “yes vs. no” assessment. However, in the case of a rubric, each point along the scale is clearly defined and described.

Questions to consider when creating rubric:

1. What are the specific tasks of the assignment?
2. What are the learning outcomes you are trying to achieve with this assignment?
3. What is the purpose of the rubric? Is it meant to provide formative assessment (student feedback) or to provide a grade (summative assessment)?  Is it qualitative or quantitative?
4. What areas do you wish to assess?  Using neutral language, decide on descriptors that show a full range of skills and knowledge, with clear indicators of each level of performance.

Examples of rubrics to assess:

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Assessing learning with quizzes and exams

When carefully constructed, quizzes and exams can effectively assess different aspects of learning, often including such domains as critical thinking, clinical reasoning, creative thinking, application of ideas, integration of theory and practice, problem-solving, and decision-making. The nature of the questions (e.g. true/false, short answer, open-ended, solution) will depend on the kind of learning that the instructor seeks to elicit in his or her students, ideally focusing on questions that get at higher order thinking, rather than reproducing content. The University of Michigan's Center for Research on Learning and Teaching offers a helpful set of guidelines for designing and grading exams. Instructors might also find it beneficial to refer to Bloom’s Taxonomy. 

In assessing open-ended responses, instructors might use a rubric to ensure consistency in grading. Instructors might also draw on Biggs' Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes  (SOLO), which maps onto Bloom’s Taxonomy, to assess student responses (see document).  As Biggs explains, “this is a means of classifying learning outcomes in terms of their complexity, enabling us to assess students’ work in terms of its quality not of how many bits of this and of that they have got right. At first we pick up only one or few aspects of the task (uni-structural), then several aspects but they are unrelated (multi-structural), then we learn how to integrate them into a whole (relational), and finally, we are able to generalize that whole to as yet untaught applications (extended abstract).” The T table lists verbs associated with each level. The second row offers examples of questions at each level; the third row indicates students' responses at each level. An instructor may seek to have students answer a relational question, yet some students only answer at a uni-structural level. 

Strategies for helping students learn from quizzes and exams:

• developing exams and quizzes that do not rely primarily on the ability to reproduce information from lecture or texts
• students could be allowed to re-do incorrect answers, identifying where they made errors and how they would rectify them, instructors might offer students partial or additional credit
• students might be exposed to variation of responses, perhaps from exams in previous years (letting students see examples of strong and weak responses)
• generally, allowing students enough time and space to answer questions in a timely way

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Assessing Critical Thinking

To assess critical thinking, instructors should first identify the critical thinking skill(s) that they wish their students to achieve. Common critical thinking skills include the ability to: evaluate evidence or authority, examine central issues or assumptions, recognize and evaluate important relationships, evaluate multiple (or competing perspectives), provide alternate explanations and interpretations, separate relevant and irrelevant information; use evidence to inform arguments and conclusion; identify and explain the best solution for a real-world problem using relevant information, explain how changes in a (real-world) problem situation might affect the solution, look for--or create--new solutions; reframe problems, questions, issues, and reflect on one’s own gaps, strengths, and weaknesses.

From there, instructors can determine a rubric which identifies the criteria associated with the activity and skill, and determine the level to which each criteria has been met. Rubric scales for each criteria might include such performance levels as less plausible to most plausible; superficial to deep; unconnected to deeply connected; irrelevant to relevant; or novice to mastery.

Examples:

(1) Students in an engineering class have to determine which points of data are extraneous pieces of information, and which need to be charted on a graph and explained. They are required to explain which data were used and which data were omitted in final project.  Their responses will be assessed on how logical the selection of data points, and the clarity of the explanations.

(2) Students in a marketing class have been asked to analyze a case study and create a set of solutions based on outside research of trends. The rubric to assess their critical thinking includes the following criteria: (a) the extent to which underlying assumptions are identified and questioned, (b) the extent to which the student has identified plausible solutions, and (c) how effectively solutions are communicated

(3) Students in a history class must identify which evidence drawn from a collection of documents will help support an original thesis statement, offering a cause or set of causes to help explain a given trend or event. They must then rank a set of scholarly arguments, from “Most Plausible to Least Plausible” and describe their reasoning behind each chosen ranking. The responses are assessed for their level of plausibility, use of evidence, the depth of their analysis, as well as their successful evaluation of multiple points of view.

References:

List adapted from Stein, B.  & Haynes, A. (2011): Engaging Faculty in the Assessment and Improvement of Students' Critical Thinking Using the Critical Thinking Assessment Test, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 43:2, 44-49

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Assessing essays and other written work 

Assessing essays and other written work can be tricky, partly because writing assessment is subjective and partly because “good writing” varies with the purpose of an assignment and the field or “discourse community.” For example, instructors in English look for different characteristics in an analysis of a play than biology instructors want to see in a lab report. But when grades vary, many students mistakenly assume that assessment of writing in college is idiosyncratic and unfair.

To prevent that misconception and to help students develop a better understanding of how to write in different fields and for different audiences, one best practice is to share grading criteria with students when making an assignment and when returning a paper with a grade, as can be seen in these examples from first-year seminars, an introductory engineering course, and an upper level biology course. 

In addition, if instructors assign more than one paper in a quarter, they can explain how the categories of assessment – such as purpose, organization, development, style, and mechanics – remain constant even though in some instances students will be writing an argument or analysis, while in others they may be telling a story or reporting on survey data. The more we help students move beyond a simplistic and rigid, “rules-based” understanding of writing, the more we will be helping them prepare for the variety of writing they will need to do throughout their lives.

One special case is assessment of writing done by non-native English speakers. In this case, instructors often grade primarily on content (purpose, development, organization, and quality of insights), while looking for improvement in style and mechanics, but not mastery. One good strategy is to help students with one area of grammar at a time, such as tenses or pronoun reference, and then grade on improvement in that one area.

For more resources about assessing and responding to student writing, see nuwrite.northwestern.edu

Rubric for assessing written work in a foreign language

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Assessing group projects

Group projects can help develop skills in collaboration, leadership, and time management, and they often mirror the work settings many students will be experiencing. The assessment of group projects can place more emphasis on process and skills than on content recall, and often encourages students to explain strategies rather than simply supply answers. But it can be challenging to assess individual students and their inputs within this group context.

Two approaches aim to balance the assessment of the group with the assessment of the individual’s achievements by assigning a grade for each. If a project can be equitably divided into distinct tasks (or roles), these tasks can be assigned to individuals and their contributions can be marked separately. Some tasks will likely involve everyone, so for the ultimate product/outcome, a group mark will be assigned and given to each member of the group.

In a second example, each member also receives the same group grade. However, each student additionally writes a reflection paper on the process and group dynamics, and describing his or her unique contributions to the project. Individual students are graded on these papers.

Peer assessment can be a fitting approach to group projects, since students’ peers may be most informed about one another’s contributions. Students can be asked to allocate a proportion of a total mark to each member of their group. Peer assessment requires a good deal of preparation and expectation-setting, with students agreeing ahead of time on criteria to be used. An example of this type of assessment is available below.

Midterm Peer Evaluations

Assessing Student Projects Rubric

References

Implementing Small-Group Instruction: Insights from Successful Practitioners by James L. Cooper, Jean MacGregor, Karl A. Smith, Pamela Robinson: 

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Assessing discussion and participation

Instructors often consider discussion and student participation to be a vital component of their courses—and for student engagement overall—but many struggle with how to meaningfully assess these elements.

To begin, instructors should think carefully about what they believe constitutes meaningful student contributions. Does it mean asking (or answering) questions? Does it mean listening to others and responding in respectful thoughtful ways? Does it mean reflecting on course concepts and ideas before or after class, and sharing those reflections with others?  Is it to consider multiple points of view or to synthesize ideas of others? 

Assessing discussion– Center for Education in Law and Democracy
Assessing discussion rubric 

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Assessing creative work

This is a course surrounded by skepticism: How can something as elusive as creativity be measured? However, a lot of work has been done in this area over the past several decades. Given its associations with innovation, adaptability, critical thinking, and problem solving, it can be critical to understand the degree to which students are manifesting creativity.

With so many definitions of creativity in existence, it is important to clarify the definition being used in the context of the course or program as well as the specific student outcomes around creativity.

If students are assigned to create a tangible product (or an idea for a product), the focus of the assessment might be the product/idea itself. Following the practice of creative product assessment in both academic and corporate settings, specific dimensions of creativity can be identified (such as novelty, usefulness, and elegance of design), and those dimensions can be assessed. Those making the judgments along these dimensions might include instructors, other students, and/or external field experts. The use of “authentic assessment,” where the assessment process reflects the way feedback would be shared and used in the “real world,” can appropriately be applied to product/idea development.

The process of creativity and creative thinking can also be assessed. For example, students might fill out checklists of behaviors deemed creative (such as identifying problems or referencing sources outside the discipline for inspiration). Tests of divergent thinking might additionally be used if one of the outcomes is to develop creative capacities that transfer beyond the subject at hand.

Using multiple assessment techniques and having the assessment stem from multiple sources, such as the instructors, peers, experts, and self-assessments, is particularly valuable when assessing and providing feedback on creativity.

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Authentic Assessment

Just as authentic learning experiences engage students in work processes that researchers and experts use every day, authentic assessment reflects the ways in which field practitioners work and receive feedback. It directly examines the intended benefit of student learning, rather than measuring an out-of-context proxy.

Part of what distinguishes authentic assessment is the intended audience of the student’s presentation of material. In more traditional assessment approaches, students may write papers with the instructor as the intended audience. In authentic assessment, students may present a proposal, performance, or service as they would in their field of practice, for example, to a real or imagined relevant audience. The work itself may also serve a real purpose, such as a problem to be solved.

Because students or groups of students within a single class may be producing very different “products” to be assessed in very different environments, authentic assessment necessitates a degree of adaptivity in grading. The time this requires, and the challenges in creating consistent grading criteria, should be considered in light of the learning benefits of this approach.

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Self assessment

Giving students the opportunity to assess themselves can help them take responsibility for their own learning and support the development of intellectual independence.  Self assessment can help gauge a student’s conceptual knowledge, skills, abilities, self-efficacy attitudes, and values; and may help students identify their own strengths, weaknesses, and gaps.

If using a rubric, instructors might wish to involve students in the scoring process. For example, an instructor might have students score themselves before entering a conversation about how he or she would score them; the conversation can focus on areas of discrepancy. The instructor might decide then to alter his or her own score in some cases, and in other cases, might take the opportunity to clarify expectations.

Evidence suggests that giving students a role in developing the criteria against which they will measure their own success affords them even greater ownership over their learning. Criteria development can look a little like a negotiation process, where some of the instructor’s basic standards for success serve as a starting point around which the student’s personal objectives can be defined. And this helps each student account for his/her personal baseline of knowledge upon entering the course or program. Even when students help develop the criteria, they may need guidance in applying it.

A simple process, clearly defined criteria, and enough time allotted for conversations with students can help make self-assessment a positive and effective method.

References

Panadero, E., Jonsson, A., & Botella, J. (2017). Effects of self-assessment on self-regulated learning and self-efficacy: Four meta-analyses. Educational Research Review, 22, 74-98.

Peer and self assessment in student work: principles and criteria

Nulty, D. D. A Guide to Peer and Self Assessment.

McMillan, J. H., & Hearn, J. (2008). Student self-assessment: The key to stronger student motivation and higher achievement. Educational Horizons,87(1), 40-49.

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Peer assessment

Peer assessment is an important developmental tool, not only for the person being assessed, but for the peer assessor as well. The ability to discern strengths and weaknesses, and to offer strategies and solutions for improvement, are important skills for students to develop. Many students also appreciate the opportunity to share their thoughts about a peer’s performance and quality of work with the instructor, particularly when the peers have been working together in a group setting. Ideally, peers will be assessed using the same criteria that individuals might use to assess themselves. Eexample of self and peer assessment tool: 

In a creative setting, peer assessment may also be an invaluable form of authentic assessment.

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Equity and Assessment

At Northwestern, we seek to ensure that all students, regardless of socioeconomic status, race, or gender, have equal opportunities to perform at their personal best. Assessments must therefore be designed to be inclusive. The following suggestions for making assessments culturally responsive are drawn from a paper put forth by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) in 2017, “Equity and Assessment: Moving Towards Culturally Responsive Assessment.”

• Involve students in developing the course learning objectives
• Help students reflect on their learning experiences
• Allow for variation in how learning is demonstrated
• Be mindful of personal biases when assessing student work and making use of assessment results

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The explosive growth of information is our era’s most significant defining characteristic. In this Age of Information, the amount of data, the uses for that data, the number of data sources and the routes it travels all grow at exponential rates. The growth creates new industries for defining, collecting, accessing, processing and curating information.

In such an environment, everybody recognizes the essence of Information Governance, but how to undertake this massive task is harder to grasp.

Today’s organizations experience explosive growth in the volume and variety of the data they collect, process and store. Unfortunately, many do not understand the types of data they handle and what value it has, which means they cannot use or maintain it properly. As a result, they fail to achieve the success level they would have if they kept proper management over the data.

Organizations can also suffer serious financial, legal and reputational consequences over poor data management. Information Governance helps to avoid a similar fate.

So, what is Information Governance (IG) and what role does it play in today’s business environment? This guide sheds some light on IG – an emerging data management area that focuses on business processes and compliance.

What is Information Governance (IG)?

IG refers to a strategic approach to maximize the value of data and mitigate the risks associated with the creation, use and sharing of enterprise information. It recognizes the information as an organizational asset that requires high-level oversight and coordination to ensure accountability, protection, integrity and appropriate preservation of enterprise information.

IG aims to break down silos and avoid any fragmentation in information management, which ensures that it remains trustworthy and that organizations experience ROI in the processes, technology and people they use to manage information.

Information governance has many formal definitions, but Gartner’s is the most widely accepted. It defines IG as an accountability framework that ensures appropriate behavior in the creation, valuation, use, archiving, deletion and storage of information. It includes the standards and metrics, roles and policies, and the processes required to ensure effective and efficient information use and enable organizations to achieve their goals.

IG processes help manage the use of information records, such as customer information, employee records, medical records and intellectual property. Your company’s IG professionals should work with your leadership and any other stakeholders in the creation of policies that specify how your employees should handle all corporate information assets.

The critical goals of Information Governance include the following:

• Understanding and promoting the value of data assets
• Effectively resolving any data-related issues and creating processes that prevent future occurrences
• Enforcing conformance to standards and policies relating to Information Governance
• Defining and approving data strategies, standards, policies and associated metrics and procedures
• Communicating data policies clearly with the relevant people
• Sponsoring, tracking and overseeing the delivery of data management projects

Information Governance frameworks

To help you clearly define Information Governance goals and processes, you can develop frameworks to outline your organization’s approach formally. The framework outlines and answers who, what, where, when, how and why questions.

You should tailor your framework to fit your organization’s unique needs, but it should define the areas discussed below:

1. Scope: It establishes the extent of your information governance program including a clear outline of its overall goals, the types of data that the program will manage, and what staff members will help achieve these goals.
2. Policies and Procedures: The framework defines the overall corporate policies and procedures that are relevant to the IG program as a whole. It includes data security, retention and disposal schedules, records management, information sharing policies and privacy.
3. Roles and Responsibilities: The framework should define the information governance program’s essential functions, including what IG responsibilities specific departments and employees will have as part of its integration and implementation.
4. Internal and External Data Management: An IG framework defines how the organization and its employees manage specific data. Relevant sections include legal and regulatory compliance, management of personal information, acceptable content types, how information is shared and how data is stored and archived.

It is also vital to establish how organizations operate and share information with their partners, stakeholders and suppliers. Your framework should define the policies and procedures established for sharing information with third parties, how the Information Governance process influences contractual obligations and how you will determine whether your partners and third parties meet your IG goals.

What's more, your framework should clearly outline procedures in the event of data breaches, including how to report violations and information losses, disaster recovery processes, incident management specifics, business continuity strategies, and how you will audit these disaster recovery and business continuity processes.

Finally, your framework should outline your process of continuous monitoring. Include plans for quality assurance of IG processes such as how you will monitor information access, measure regulatory compliance adherence, conduct risk assessments, maintain adequate security and review the IG program as a whole.

Information Governance vs. data governance

Many people, and organizations, consider IG and data governance as the same thing. Although both are essential for companies to achieve their business objectives, and despite some overlap between them, they are not identical.

Information Governance gets organizations business value from their data assets. It’s the technologies and activities that organizations employ to maximize their information value while minimizing associated costs and risks.

On the other hand, data governance refers to the control of information at business-unit levels to ensure it is accurate and reliable. Its programs involve procedures to manage data usability, availability, integrity and security.

In short, data governance keeps rubbish from getting in, while IG refers to the decisions you make in using data.

Here are some examples of the types of activities involved in both areas to help illustrate the differences.

• Data governance activities include the management of metadata, data operations, data management, data architecture, data quality and primary data.
• IG, on the other hand, concerns itself with an organization’s data lifecycle management. It includes activities and processes such as personal information exchange, regulatory compliance audits, records, retention schedule, e-discovery and data privacy protection.

Data governance is the responsibility of IT, but IG has a broader scope. You can use IG to meet business and compliance needs concerning the use and retention of data, which makes it a strategic discipline that plays a significant part in your corporate governance.

Applying IG and data governance together can result in information management practices that help you deliver higher business value.

Why is Information Governance important?

Information is a vital resource in any organization or business. Without it, business operations are not possible. Accordingly, companies make investments in processes, technology and people to ensure that information can support the enterprise.

Due to the significant investments associated with the creation, use, protection and sharing of information, organizations view it as a type of business asset, not unlike the equipment, buildings and financial resources needed to run the business.

Oversight and stewardship of resources or assets is the primary aim of any business governance. What’s more, just like any other asset, the information requires management to ensure that you address its value and associated risks responsibly.

Information Governance provides businesses with a disciplined approach to managing the risks and value associated with information.

Since IG is still an emerging field, numerous questions exist around its role in business processes. However, a properly implemented IG program allows organizations to do the following:

• Support business needs, priorities and strategic objectives, which vary based on things like organization culture, available resources and the level of stakeholder engagement
• Avoid data breaches
• Achieve regulatory compliance and reduce associated risks such as penalties
• Improve data analytics capabilities
• Improve the ROI in enterprise business intelligence
• Build control over outsourced IT and proliferating systems
• Increase employee awareness about key information policies
• Reduce the costs of information storage and eDiscovery (document discovery technology)

For example, due to the challenges that the healthcare industry is currently facing, with relation to changes in care, payment models, requirements to partner with others, new customer expectations, technology and increased regulation, Information Governance is now more critical than ever. It is the best way for healthcare and related organizations to ensure that their information is reliable and that they can trust it to meet all their diverse needs.

IG allows you to make decisions driven by the needs of your organization and not technology. It also eliminates accidental decision-makers (people who happen to possess data at a particular point during its cycle) because they tend to make decisions independently of other stakeholder needs.

How to get started

To identify the best place to start your IG initiative, you need to figure out a way to support your organization’s strategic efforts with reliable information and data.

Organizations usually have a mission and vision that guides them along as they conduct business and develop strategies to help achieve their goals. Thus, taking a careful look at those business strategies and goals can supply you a strong hint about where and how to start your IG initiative.

Since you cannot achieve any organizational goal without useful information, the best place to start your IG initiative is identifying a problem (pain point) with information that requires addressing, or even a business opportunity that reduces costs and enhances revenue.

Such strategic alignment means that you should put your IG needs as part of a broader strategy that will help achieve your organizational goals. Your goals can be extensive and varied, such as better management of space (real estate), expanding service offerings through the acquisition and integration of other businesses, creating new customer service protocols or reducing your costs.

Since IG is a set requirement of responsibility and rights to allow the suitable function of various information aspects, the provision of decision rights determines data ownership and who has the right to make decisions about it.

Therefore, by defining owners and decision-makers, you can assign responsibility and accountability to data decisions, which is probably an essential concept to implement when creating your IG policy. Accountability is vital since as data dependence grows, you can make business decisions by default, usually by selecting the easiest path and often in isolation from other considerations.

Key Information Governance areas

You should consider the following key areas when creating your Information Governance policy:

Usage policy: You can contain a lot of security risk using a well-defined usage policy that specifically details who can access data and under what circumstances.

Accountability: You should create a position such as Chief Data Officer or dedicate a department to the creation of standard policies to ensure that someone in your organization is responsible for data-handling policies.

Records Management: Large organizations could store up to 10 petabytes of information annually, which is costly. Using IG, you could save on storage costs by identifying and storing data that has value.

Compliance: Laws, business needs and regulations govern how you keep your information. After that, you should discard it as per an established lifecycle schedule base on legal, regulatory and business requirements.

Education: As with all other company policies, the training of your employees, partners and vendors about your IG program competes the circle.

Technology: A complete IG can also address IT governance. It can provide IT specialists with policies such as the creation of storage hierarchies or obtaining appropriately scaled access schemes.

Benefits of Information Governance

• Safer and secure data. An effective IG policy allows you to create rules, standards, regulations and responsibilities geared towards keeping data safe and secure.

• IG increases productivity because it facilitates collaboration through intelligence information sharing.

• Reduced costs. A clear IG policy allows your organization to save money because it becomes more discerning of what data you store, in what media you store it and for how long. It also reduces wasteful duplication of effort.

• Efficient data access. IG allows you to access usable and meaningful data easily because it is classified, secured and supported by clear policies.

• Risk management. Information policies that classify data allow you to scale risk as per the data types, which focuses on high security where it is required.

• Business intelligence. Efficient and easy access to trending and historical data allows developers and marketers to make better-informed decisions.

• Lifecycles efficiencies. IG removes data silos, which means you can gain more value from your data at every point in its lifecycle.

• Regulatory compliance. Without well-classified and easily accessible data, the process of gathering data for regulatory requirements becomes a nightmare.

• IG dramatically reduces the costs of litigation and discovery. It enables fast and thorough e-Discovery because it allows easy identification and access to only the appropriate information.

• IG increases business agility due to improved decision-making processes. It outlines how the organization will avail information to business users, which reduces compartmentalization and bureaucracies.

• Shortened sales cycles increase profitability.

• Helps companies provide better customer service. IG has set the standard for how you organize, categorize and access information.

• IG improves employee productivity by providing as few versions of pieces of information or a document as possible, making information easy to store and access.

Information Governance laws and regulations

As corporate data volumes grow and technological innovations continually expand business capabilities, regulations that put strict laws and mandates on the IG process have become the norm. This is true for data security and privacy since personally identifiable information (PIN) has recently become a massive target for nefarious online actors and hackers.

Privacy laws have started expanding globally, creating new information security governance obligations. Many industries have become subject to regulations requiring the retention of electronic communications and records for a minimum period. These regulations include directives from federal agencies such as the Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency or the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Regulatory reporting requirements also mandate organizations to provide a detailed annual account of compliance. A sound business records management process provides evidence to demonstrate compliance.

What’s more, compliance rules such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, require organizations to attest the authenticity of their IG programs and records.

There exist numerous industry and government requirements related to data security, records management and data retention that can affect your IG strategy. Below are some of the essential laws that all organizations operating in the USA need to know.

• Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX): It’s a critical regulation that applies to all public companies. SOX standardizes record management practices without exception. It requires the implementation of controls over risk mitigation process and corporate financial records. It also stipulates that companies must keep business records for at least five years.

• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): It applies to healthcare providers as well as health information organizations and other covered business associate and entities that store, manage and transmit protected health information.

• The Federal Records Act (44 USC 31) and related statutes: Require federal agencies to create complete records that document all their activities. They should also file records for safe storage practices, efficient retrieval and proper disposal.

• The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA): It requires financial institutions to protect their customers’ non-public personal information. They must store financial records securely until they are no longer needed, then they must destroy them to ensure that nobody can access them.

• Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA)

• Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS)

• Federal Rules of Civil Procedure

Measuring Information Governance progress

Assessment tools such as the IG Maturity Model and the IG Reference Model help companies measure the progress of their Information Governance progress. The IG Reference Model provides corporations, industry associations, analyst firms and other interested parties a tool that allows them to communicate to and with stakeholders concerning processes, practices and responsibilities of their IG program.

On the other hand, the IG Maturity Model is based on ARMA’s eight Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles. The maturity model defines the characteristics of various recordkeeping program levels that range from substandard to transformational IG. The goal of organizations is to reach the top transformational level where IG strategies are integrated into the overall corporate infrastructure or business processes to help boost cost containment, client services and competitive advantage.

Conclusion

IG is a set requirement of responsibility and rights to allow the suitable function of various aspects of information that include creation, valuation, use, storage, deletion and archiving. To use data effectively, IG includes policies, purposes, processes and standards that help organizations achieve their goals.

Information Governance brings organizations significant benefit and value, especially as their data collection and stores grow and regulatory oversight increases. The development and implementation of a sound IG strategy help organizations ensure data availability, control costs, mitigate cyber risks and meet regulatory challenges. Get started today before your organization suffers a security breach, faces a lawsuit, fails an audit or suffers reputational damage.

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Heilala Vanilla, New Zealand’s leading grower, producer and manufacturer of premium vanilla products for baking, today announced that it has been certified as aB Corporation.

This milestone underscores the brand's commitment to sustainability, transparency, and accountability, with Heilala being the first vanilla company in the world to receive this prestigious certification, finishing the process with an impressive 104.7 points.

B Corp Certification further demonstrates the company’s purpose-led mission by becoming the latest Kiwi company to be recognised for demonstrating its commitment to making the world a better place.

The company’s purpose is to empower and Improve the livelihoods of agricultural communities in Tonga. This purpose is incredibly important to the Heilala business and acts as the company’s ‘north star’.

"Since day one, we've had a mission to be ‘the good vanilla’, from how we source our beans, to the way we communicate with our team and customers, and how we're improving futures within our grower communities," says Jennifer Boggiss, Heilala Vanilla CEO. "We are immensely proud to have achieved this certification, however,we see this as just part of our journey to achieving our goals across our team, ourTongan community and the environment," concludes Boggiss.

B Corp is a global movement of companies that have made it their mission to do business responsibly, balancing the interest of people, profit and purpose. It ensures all company decisions create a positive impact on its teams, clients, suppliers, community and the environment. Heilala already had in place several measures required for B Corp certification such as independent governance, a shareholder's agreement that is aligned around purpose, a globally unique zero-waste process that has recently been registered as a patent, living wage employer with a very diverse team across Tauranga and Tonga, and impact projects in Tonga spanning over the last decade.

The certification shines a light on every aspect of the company and is based on five pillars; Governance, Workers, Community, Environment and Customers. The below descriptions outline how Heilala Vanilla meets each of its targets:

Community

Heilala has always paid their Tongan growers above market price as they are focused on building an industry of vanilla excellence in Tonga, supporting not only growers with training but also the wider grower communities with many Impact projects from education (classrooms supplies, sporting equipment, support for school fees), through to emergency crisis support. The exact January 15 natural disaster saw Heilala Vanilla raise more than $180,000 through its Foundation to support communities in Tonga.

From April 1, 2022, five cents from the purchase of every Heilala Vanilla product will be donated to the Heilala Vanilla Foundation, delivering sustainable projects in agriculture and education to empower Tongan families and rural communities.Governance The company’s purpose of empowering Tongan rural communities is embedded in its shareholder's agreement and all stakeholders are aligned around being a purpose-driven business. It has independent directors and diversity on its Board of Directors with more than 50 per cent being women.

Employees- 

An engagement score of over 90 per cent- A Living Wage employer in both NZ and TongaA very diverse and loyal team- Providing employment within Tongan communities with a particular focus onWomen

Environment

Outside of the unique zero waste process, Heilala recognises there is a continual piece of work to reduce the impact of its packaging on the environment alongside working towards a goal of being carbon neutral by 2025.

Customer

Heilala holds itself to the highest third-party auditing and certification standards and has recently been awarded AA rating in the BRC food safety audit, a globally recognised certification. The customer pillar also measures customer engagement, satisfaction, and ethical marketing practices.The B Corp assessment and verification process measures a company’s entire performance, from supply chains to community work to employee benefits. It is widely considered to be the gold standard of environmental and social certification, ensuring customers and stakeholders have confidence in a company’s impact story and purpose-led initiatives.

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On the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 2021, Jennifer Crumbley pushed through the glass door at the Accurate Range. Jennifer, who goes by “Jehn,” appeared self-assured — a tall 43-year-old mother in jeans and a nubbly sweater coat. In her left hand, she carried a black case that held the SIG Sauer 9-mm. semi-automatic pistol her husband, James, had purchased at a gun shop near their home in Oxford, Michigan, the previous day.

The Crumbleys’ 15-year-old son, Ethan, had come along. He stood awkwardly by, glancing distractedly at the semi-automatic rifles for rent on the wall. After consulting with him, Jehn paid cash for half an hour of range time, 100 rounds of 9-mm. ammunition, and two paper targets.

It’s not unusual to see kids at the Accurate Range, which markets itself as a family place. Situated in a shedlike building next to a software firm and across the street from a Taco Bell, the range resembles a suburban bowling alley down to its crowded parking lot and the flashing green-and-red OPEN sign in the front window. Accurate has a party space, and it promotes seniors mornings with free coffee and doughnuts and Mother’s Day with free gun rentals and snacks. It co-sponsors church dinners, and when it exhibits its wares at gun shows, it advertises “kid-friendly outdoor activities, raffles/door prizes, and beautiful wildlife displays.” Under federal law, it is illegal for a minor to own a handgun, but the same law includes an exemption for target practice. The Crumbleys had sometimes gone to the range during the pandemic. A signed waiver for Ethan was already on file.

Ethan faced the long, narrow gallery first. He stepped slightly back from the small metal counter, lifted the pistol, and, turning it over, discovered how to click in the magazine. He aimed and fired, pausing and then, as he became accustomed to the motion, firing 14 times in quick succession. Jehn, behind him, waited for him to finish. The CCTV camera shows her jiggling her foot, which she frequently did later in court, in chains.

When Jehn took her turn, she approached the counter and Ethan showed her how to load the gun and flip the safety. After a couple of rounds, she called him over, and like a golf instructor, he rearranged the fingers of her left hand on the grip of the gun. She fired again, and when she was done, Ethan gently placed the pistol and the magazine back into the padded case. Then Jehn carried the case through the lobby and out to the parking lot. At around 7 p.m., Jehn posted a photo on Instagram. It showed a paper target riddled with holes. “Mom & son day testing out his new Xmas present. My first time shooting a 9mm I hit the bullseye.” She also posted a photo of the family’s Christmas tree, still untrimmed.

Three days later, on Tuesday, November 30, while Jehn was at the office and James was out making DoorDash deliveries, Ethan, a sophomore at Oxford High School, went into the boys’ bathroom between classes. He allegedly took the SIG Sauer out of his backpack and walked down the long, curved hallway, shooting at his schoolmates. He has been charged as an adult in Michigan with the deaths of Madisyn Baldwin, Hana St. Juliana, Tate Myre, and Justin Shilling. The 24 felony counts against him include first-degree murder, assault with intent to murder, possession of a firearm, and terrorism. Michigan does not have a death penalty, and his trial will not begin until January at the earliest, but Ethan Crumbley can expect to spend his whole life incarcerated.

What took place at Oxford High School is a horror tale, agonizing in its particulars and familiar in its outlines. But then the Oakland County prosecutor, Karen McDonald, did something extraordinary. A former teacher and a mother of five, she stood up at a press conference three days after the shooting and, looking stricken but determined, announced she would be charging the shooter’s parents as well. James and Jennifer Crumbley face four counts each of involuntary manslaughter, charges that carry a maximum penalty of 15 years. In a prosecutor’s brief, McDonald wrote that criminal charges have never been brought against the parents of a school shooter before. But she was compelled, she said: “I am angry. I’m angry as a mother. I’m angry as the prosecutor. I’m angry as a person that lives in this county.” McDonald appeared incredulous that any parents could be so reckless as to buy a gun and tell their teenager — who was sad, isolated, and obsessed with firearms and violent video games — that it belonged to him.

Not everyone who works in the Oakland County prosecutor’s office thought McDonald was taking a prudent course. In general, prosecutors don’t accept cases they aren’t confident they can win. And McDonald, a popular Democrat in a politically mixed county, would have known she was entering a morass. Oxford is gun country, and no one in town wanted to frame the shooting as a gun problem. In Oxford, kindergartners get BB guns as gifts, and high-schoolers post selfies with their guns and hunting trophies on Instagram. Elissa Slotkin, the Democratic congresswoman from the district, spent childhood summers on a farm nearby, where her father kept more than a dozen guns in his office, all unlocked. Since the shooting, it’s not uncommon to see a pickup truck bearing two bumper stickers: one with an assault rifle and a 2A slogan, the other with OXFORD STRONG, the post-shooting mantra of the town.

The Crumbleys owned three handguns, including the new pistol, and in a letter she wrote to Donald Trump congratulating him on his win in 2016, Jehn thanked him for supporting her right to bear arms. Michigan is an open-carry state, and concealed-carry permits are easy to obtain. (The Accurate Range offers certification courses on Saturdays and Sundays.) There are no safe-storage laws in Michigan, meaning that even if the Crumbleys did have the SIG Sauer unlocked on the night before the shooting, they wouldn’t have been committing a crime. McDonald regards the gun laws in Michigan as “woefully inadequate,” as she said at the press conference, but she didn’t press the point.

Instead, McDonald declared she would prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Jennifer and James Crumbley had grossly neglected their parental duty by not averting the obvious danger their son presented — and so were directly responsible for the deaths of four teenagers, the injuries of seven, and the trauma of the town. The parents’ trial is scheduled to begin on October 24, and based on preliminary court filings, the evidence before the jury will be a catalogue of an American family’s everyday life: text threads about chores, vacations, whereabouts, and homework; selfies, cell-phone videos, and social-media posts; school communications and unpaid bills; phone records and voice-mails. McDonald will say all the evidence adds up to a picture of parents so inattentive and irresponsible that they failed to heed Ethan’s cries for help and instead gave him a gun. Shannon Smith and Mariell Lehman, the lawyers for Jennifer and James, respectively, will say that the Crumbleys may not be perfect people but that there’s no legal mechanism to convict them of a crime based on what they didn’t know about their son. The outcome will depend on a jury’s determination of where these parents’ responsibilities end and how much they should have been expected to see.

After the shooting, James and Jennifer went to the local police station, where they were interviewed. James started making calls to lawyers; Jehn begged her boss to let her keep her job. “I’m bawling right now,” Jehn texted a friend that night. “My son ruined so many lives today.” Then they fled their home on East Street — now a crime scene — for a hotel. The Crumbleys did not feel safe, their lawyers said later, with the press camped out and death threats swamping their phones. Upon learning that they were also to be charged, they holed up in an artist’s studio in a Detroit warehouse belonging to one of Jehn’s acquaintances and stopped responding to phone calls. At around 1:30 a.m. on the Saturday after the press conference, police found them there. Prosecutors say they had four burner phones (one they’d tried to destroy), four gift cards, ten credit cards, and $6,600 in cash. They had cleaned out Ethan’s bank account. According to a prosecutor’s motion, Jehn told a friend that “her son’s destiny is done and she has to take care of herself.”

Over two days in February, a preliminary examination was conducted at the Oakland County courthouse to establish the prosecutor’s right to move forward with the criminal trial. (The reporting in this story includes public testimony and documentation from those hearings, as well as other court filings and testimony. On June 27, Judge Cheryl Matthews issued a gag order preventing attorneys on both sides from speaking to the press. Neither the prosecution nor the defense were able to comment.) In Oxford, residents closely followed these proceedings and every motion and court appearance since. It’s a small town, nearly everyone I spoke to knows at least one of the victims or their family, and the fury directed at the Crumbleys is palpable. “I blame the parents completely,” Rosemary Bayer, the Democratic state senator from the district, told me. “I’m not a doctor. I’m not a psychologist. But it’s never the kid’s fault.” Twice, the Crumbleys’ lawyers have asked the court to reduce their bond from $500,000 to $100,000, and twice they’ve been denied. Marisa Prince, who serves lunch at Oxford schools and employed Hana St. Juliana as her children’s babysitter, believes the Crumbleys are better off in jail. “They’re safer there,” she says. “People are on edge with how mad they are.”

A special antipathy is reserved for Jehn. In town, people speak of her as not maternal, “a ballbuster,” absent at home. On private Facebook pages, Jehn is depicted as “the one pulling the strings, wearing the pants, the mean one,” says Lori Bourgeau, who is on the Oxford Village council. In the public mind, which extends far beyond Oxford, James is seen as the passive, gentle parent and Jehn as a mother who failed to support her son with love or discipline and who, when things started to go wrong, remained blind to her child’s descent. The lawyers for James and Jehn used to be partners, and the question of a conflict of interest has come up repeatedly in court. Buried within that question is another: whether James might testify against his wife and take a plea.

Oxford is a town of 22,000 people, wedged between horse farms to the north and Detroit and its suburbs to the south. Politically speaking, Oxford is pure purple; since the 1990s, it has voted for George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, then Trump twice — the last time in a squeaker. Oxford High School, the only one in town, is the magnetic force at the center of it all. The social lives of adults and children revolve around the schedules of the varsity sports teams, and during football season, the whole town pours into the school’s stadium, where the field is covered with professional-grade blue turf, an extravagance that required some members of the Wildcats booster club to put up their homes for collateral in case the town couldn’t pay the tab.

Jehn grew up in Clarkston, 14 miles away. In high school, she skied with the junior-varsity team; in her 1996 senior yearbook photo, her face is framed by a bouffant. She had a brash, sarcastic side, as she said in her letter to Trump, which was downloaded from James’s Facebook page and circulated widely after the shooting. That’s why, even though she regarded herself as a feminist, she didn’t mind Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” comment: “I say things all the time that people take the wrong way, do I mean them, not always.”

She and James married on the beach in Florida in September 2005. Two years older and tall, tanned, and hazel-eyed, James had grown up around Jacksonville. He was charming — “happy-go-lucky,” according to people who know him, the kind of guy who’s always asking you over for a beer. Florida public records show that James was brought to court for passing bad checks and driving with a suspended license. Jehn, too, has been charged with writing bad checks. They were both found guilty in a 2005 DUI.

Ethan was born in 2006, and when he was in elementary school, the Crumbleys moved to Oxford. Their house was not the best house on East Street but not the worst one, either. It was one story with three bedrooms, a sunny kitchen, a carport, and a shed out back. Over time, the Crumbleys adopted a menagerie: Tank, a Great Pyrenees; Harley, a wolfish white rescue dog; Stella, Jehn’s cat; and Dexter, Ethan’s cat. For a while, Ethan kept a chinchilla, too.

The Crumbleys were different from most of the other families on East Street in a way that sometimes raised eyebrows. In the summer, they liked to light firecrackers in their yard, even though the noise terrified Tank so much that he would run down to a neighbor’s house to hide there. James was around the house a lot, often grilling out by the carport. He was “superfriendly. He was always high,” this neighbor says. (Police say that photos taken of the house after November 30 show evidence of marijuana having been grown in the cellar.) Jehn, the neighbor said, was almost never home. Upon resettling in Michigan, she had gotten her real-estate license and then a job as the social-media assistant at a real-estate company in Bloomfield Township. Over the next five years, while James cycled through gigs, Jehn became the family’s main earner, working her way up to marketing director. She was good at her job, “professional,” her boss testified at the preliminary examination.

The Crumbleys were not part of the OHS social life; no one could recall ever seeing any of them at a football game. “These people didn’t do that,” says Mike Aldred, a father of one of the players who was a friend of Tate Myre’s. “No one would notice the family if they dropped into a restaurant because they weren’t connected to the community.” Instead, Jehn took riding lessons at the horse farms in the countryside near Oxford and eventually bought two horses — first Shorty, then Billy. She also made friends as a volunteer on the ski patrol at Pine Knob, the tiny resort where she had skied as a kid, and on Wednesday nights, she and James played euchre at a brewpub in town. On weekends, the Crumbleys occasionally went camping, their kayaks strapped to the roof of their car.

Still, their lives in Oxford seemed to be teetering. James had two children back in Florida, and he and Jehn were often embroiled in long-distance combat over child support with the mother of his other son. When they went on weekend trips, Jehn would sometimes ask the neighbor to care for their pets; the neighbor says she would find their house in a mess: garbage stacked up against the side of the shed, the bedrooms the way “I would imagine a frat house at the end of the semester.” The interior had a stench. “The dogs would piddle on the floor in the same spot,” the neighbor says, but “Jehn laughed it off.”

Ethan mostly kept to himself, but when this neighbor passed him on the street, he always looked her in the eye and gave her a friendly wave. Not many people seemed to know him at school; those who did called him quiet and “relatively nice,” said Madeline Johnson, who was Madisyn Baldwin’s best friend.

By the early months of 2021, family life on East Street had grown tense. During the 2020–21 school year, classrooms were open, but the schedule was unpredictable: Kids and teachers were frequently out sick. Seven weeks of school that year were virtual, a reality Ethan found “incredibly difficult,” according to his guidance counselor’s court testimony. He was spending a lot of time alone in his room.

During the pandemic, James had lost a telemarketing job and begun driving for DoorDash. The couple were behind on house payments. Jehn and James would fight in the backyard, yelling so loudly that passersby could hear. Later, in court, a co-worker said Jehn’s phone arguments with James were audible through her closed office door.

James was often home with Ethan, and during the day, Jehn would frequently check in with them, asking about homework, meals, and chores. “I think your dad is sleeping,” Jehn wrote to Ethan at lunchtime on March 6.

It was around then, a little before his 15th birthday, that Ethan started to send his mother a series of texts that will be produced as evidence at trial. In the texts, Ethan said he was hearing things. Imaginary presences felt real to him. He sounded lonely and afraid. “Can you get home now?” he wrote on March 9. “There is someone in the house I think. Someone walked into the bathroom and flushed the toilet and left the light on. And I thought it was you but when I came out no one was home. There is no one in the house tho. Dude my door just slammed. Maybe it’s just my perinoa [sic]. But when are you going to get home.”

About a week later, he seemed to be hallucinating. “Ok the house is now haunted,” he wrote. “Some weird shit just happened and now I’m scared.” And then: “I got some videos. And a picture of the demon. It is throwing BOWLS. I am not joking it fucked up the kitchen. I am just going to be outside for a while.” And finally, “can you at least text back?” If Jehn responded to him either of these times, she did not do so by text or phone.

The next day, Ethan had a meltdown. He was “really worked up and out of control,” Jehn texted James later. She gave him something to help him sleep — either melatonin or Xanax — and he fell asleep in his parents’ bed, waking up with a headache and wondering why he wasn’t in his own room.

Jehn texted James the next morning.

“You awake? Ethan awake?” she wrote just after 9:30 a.m.

“Um yeah,” he wrote. They went back and forth before Jehn decided what to do. Ethan needed to eat, work hard, and not complain, she said. On the thread, James is silent, so Jehn prods him again. “You respond and I didn’t get it?” Jehn writes.

“Jesus,” James responds.

At the preliminary examination in February, McDonald introduced the texts from Ethan to Jehn to show that the mother knew of her son’s distress yet did not take him to a doctor. Jehn had health insurance through her work, but neither James nor Ethan was on her plan. Jehn’s attorney, Shannon Smith, pointed out that it’s hard to know what a handful of texts among thousands means.

Ethan had one close friend, and in the spring of 2021, he started telling the friend by text how awful he felt. He got 17 hours of sleep over five days, he said. He was laughing and crying in the shower. He had tried to talk to his parents, but they wouldn’t listen, Ethan said.

On April 5, Ethan told his friend by text that he was thinking about calling 911 on himself but was afraid his parents would be “really pissed.” He thought he was having a mental breakdown.

“I am going to ask my parents to go to the doctor’s tomorrow or Tuesday again,” Ethan wrote. When he tried to talk to his parents before, his father had given him some medicine and told him to “suck it up,” and his mother laughed. “She makes everyone feel like shit,” he wrote.

“But this time I am going to tell them about the voices. I only told them about the people I saw.”

“Ok,” the friend wrote back.

“I also have a weird rash growing on my chest. It’s not COVID cause I got a test.”

“Hopefully they can help you man,” the friend wrote.

“Like I am mentally and physically dying,” wrote Ethan.

McDonald, the county prosecutor, is building her manslaughter case by showing that the Crumbleys failed to exercise what in the law is known as “ordinary care.” Also known as “reasonable” or “due” care, ordinary care is usually applied in civil lawsuits to prove negligence, as when a supermarket owner fails to shovel the icy walk in front of the store and is held liable when a customer slips and breaks a leg. The law understands that an ordinary person would take care to shovel the icy walks to avert such foreseeable incidents, so the negligent supermarket owner must pay a court-ordered fine. Negligence is not, generally speaking, a crime.

Occasionally, though, a prosecutor will use “gross negligence” to support a homicide charge, as when a doctor prescribes a drug to which they know a patient is allergic, or a driver texts and speeds, or a parent leaves a baby locked in a hot parked car. In these cases, a prosecutor will use words like wanton and — as McDonald does frequently — egregious to indicate an extraordinary, criminal level of negligence. Manslaughter is murder without intent or malice.

McDonald once said she “instinctually knew” she would prosecute the Crumbleys, and she has since turned herself into a fierce ally of the families of the victims. She has made the case her priority; according to Lori Borgeau, in one conversation, McDonald said “she doesn’t really care where her future goes, politically.” In Oxford, support for her is nearly universal. The course of gun restrictions is divisive, but even loyal gun owners can get behind the notion that the abandonment of personal responsibility should be punished. “Speaking as a Michigander and lifelong gun owner, responsible gun ownership requires the mental awareness to lock and secure your firearms,” says Mike Aldred. In the case of the Crumbleys, the gun “wasn’t secured. There wasn’t a care in the world. We’ve lost four babies because of it.”

Gross negligence is not a subjective charge, and a jury can’t convict the Crumbleys because it finds them abhorrent or insufficiently parental. To convict someone of manslaughter through gross negligence, a prosecutor in Michigan must prove that the defendant knew of a potentially dangerous situation, that they could have averted harm through ordinary care, and that the disastrous harm to others presented by the circumstances would have been apparent to an ordinary mind — what the attorneys call “foreseeability.”

McDonald is relying on limited precedent. In Oakland County, children regularly die of gunshots owing to the carelessness of their parents, according to Bayer, the state senator, and those parents are almost never charged with crimes. But there are exceptions, notably the 2016 case of People v. Head, in which a Detroit man left a loaded shotgun in the closet of a bedroom where his two kids decided to act out a violent video game, resulting in the death of his 9-year-old son. Head was found guilty because he knew the gun was within reach of his unsupervised children, he could have easily intervened by separating the ammunition from the gun or preventing them from accessing it, and any ordinary person could foresee that children playing with a loaded gun could result in grievous harm. The verdict was upheld on appeal.

In the Crumbley case, this kind of direct effect is more difficult to establish. The shooting was no accident, and the shooter was not a young child but an adolescent, capable of deceiving his parents. And to prove foreseeability, McDonald has to show that the Crumbleys, had they exercised “ordinary care,” would have discerned that their son could endanger lives. This is challenging, says Eve Primus, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Law. “Lots of parents have children who are troubled at various points,” she says. “What is the line where you should know that something like this would happen? What is the line between not-great parenting and criminal?”

James and Jennifer each face the same charges, but at the preliminary exam in February, McDonald emphasized Jehn’s role. In particular, she focused on the care and attention Jehn paid to her horses as proof that she prioritized her own pleasure to the detriment of her son and the safety of the community. McDonald showed that, during the months that Ethan was spiraling, Jehn went to the horse barn after work several days a week. James frequently came along while Ethan stayed home, testified Kira Pennock, who owns the barn where the Crumbleys boarded their horses and was friendly with them. Jehn knew that Ethan was “weird,” Pennock said, and that “he wasn’t out doing things like a normal kid.” Jehn had told her that “he only had one friend and that he spent a lot of time online or playing games, but he just seemed to keep to himself.”

To amplify the portrait of Jehn’s selfishness, McDonald showed that, in the year leading up to the shooting, Jehn had romantic distractions as well. Sometime in the spring or summer of 2021, Jehn and James had agreed to separate, though neither moved out of their East Street home. Jehn confided in her co-worker Amanda Holland that she had met a man whom she would see during the day, telling colleagues she was out doing errands.

“She said this person would pick her up and they would go across the street from our office,” Holland said in court.

“To where?” McDonald asked.

“Costco,” Holland replied.

“And did she say what they were doing?”

“Not directly, no.”

In the courtroom, Smith, Jehn’s lawyer, swiftly objected to this testimony, citing relevance (she was overruled), and in subsequent motions and court appearances, she and Lehman, James’s lawyer, have tried to divert the court’s attention from the character of the Crumbleys and toward what they knew and what they did. In May, Smith and Lehman submitted a long list of evidence they wished to exclude from the upcoming trial: the marijuana growing in the basement, the numerous half-empty alcohol bottles discovered after the shooting, the messiness of the house, the marital issues, the horses. Alcohol and marijuana are legal in Michigan, the defense argued, and evidence of a messy house “would place the Crumbleys on trial for not being as neat and tidy as some may believe that they should be.” Similarly, Jehn’s alleged affair would prejudice the jury against her unfairly, they argued. And just because Jehn cared for her horses doesn’t mean she didn’t care for her son, they said. The judge acceded to many of the defense’s requests, with several key exceptions. One was the horses. McDonald showed that, during the very hours Ethan was having his two apparently hallucinatory episodes and asking his mother to reply, Jehn was at the barn, taking selfies and photos of her horses. Her lawyer said that cell reception can be spotty there.

In the late spring of 2021, Ethan was torturing and decapitating baby birds. He allegedly did this in secret when his parents weren’t home, making long, grotesque videos with his phone. For at least five months, Ethan kept a bird’s head in a jar in his room, under a sheet.

“Holy shit,” he texted his friend on October 11, “my mom legit almost found the bird head. She pulled away the sheet covering it and it was fully exposed but IDK how the fuck she didn’t see it.” Several weeks before the shooting, he brought the jar to school and left it in a bathroom.

One night in August, Ethan made a video of himself handling his father’s .22-caliber KelTec pistol and sent it to his friend with an invitation to go to the shooting range the following Sunday. The friend apologized and said he wasn’t able to ask his parents. “No hard feelings,” Ethan said. Then, at 12:30 a.m., Ethan sent another video, this time of himself loading the gun and pulling back the safety. The pulse of late-summer crickets is audible, and a cat is sleeping nearby.

“Niiice,” the friend texted. “Now pull the trigger, Jkjkjkjk.”

“My dad left it out, so I thought, ‘why not?’ lol,” Ethan replied. He knows gun safety, he added, so “it’s no problem.” This was met with silence, and Ethan texts again. “Now it’s time to shoot up the school, JKJKJKJKJK.”

That fall, Jehn and James had reconciled. According to their lawyers, neither of them knew anything about these texts. But Jehn told friends that she was worried about Ethan, according to interviews and court testimony. His grandmother in Florida had died earlier that year and then Tank, one of the family dogs, had died. Ethan was taking the losses hard.

Around Halloween, Ethan’s friend was admitted to a treatment facility and the correspondence between them ceased. Ethan began spending hours on a website devoted to killings and school shootings. During the month of November, he went to the website 421 times. He also kept a journal, 21 pages of writing and drawing in a black notebook. “I have fully mentally lost it after years of fighting with my dark side,” Ethan wrote. “My parents won’t listen to me about help or a therapist.” His father knew about the journal and encouraged him to express his feelings in it. But according to the Crumbleys’ lawyers, neither parent ever looked at it, nor did they check his phone for videos, photos, or text messages or look at his browser history.

The legal dispute between the defense and the prosecution boils down to this: Should the Crumbleys be judged for what they knew, or for what they should have known? At trial, Smith and Lehman will likely argue that a jury can’t convict the Crumbleys for not having information that their son was going to murder classmates at school. And McDonald will say that any other parents would have known and intervened. Ethan had three Instagram accounts, and his parents followed one of them, but it seems not to have aroused their concern. He was posting images of deformed faces, with protruding jaws or blank eyes, contorted with glee.

Sue Klebold believes she was a good mother. She knew all of her son Dylan’s friends. She did not allow guns in the house. She prided herself on being the type of mother who “got up in the middle of the night to talk to him when he came home from the prom.” On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and his friend Eric Harris murdered 12 classmates and one teacher at Columbine High School before killing themselves. In 2016, Klebold published A Mother’s Reckoning, in which she describes her experiences living with Dylan during the last years of his life: his withdrawal, his irritation in the company of others, his annoyance at being asked to feed the cats, a meeting with his English teacher over a disturbing school paper. None of these things was sufficiently alarming on its own to propel her to act differently.

According to Klebold, all parents invest deeply in the illusion that their kids are “fine.” When they’re forced to consider that may not be true, an intellectual revolt occurs. In a 2015 report called “Making Prevention a Reality: Identifying, Assessing, and Managing the Threat of Targeted Attacks,” the FBI demonstrates that parents are among the least proactive identifiers of potential violent mass killers. Suspicious of interventions from outsiders and anxious about disapproval or punishment, parents fail to see red flags or minimize them. “As parents, we can’t know everything our children are thinking and planning. If someone is determined to hurt someone, they will hide it from us,” Klebold told me. The Sandy Hook shooter murdered his mother in her bed before going on to kill 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School. “She slept with her bedroom door unlocked, and she kept guns in the house, which she would not have done if she were frightened,” her ex-husband once said. Among kids who have thoughts of suicide, 50 percent of their parents have no idea.

Parenthood is the most ordinary of human occupations, but the idea of an “ordinary family” is artifice, an ad hoc collection of societal norms. From birth, a child is meeting or not meeting standards — height, weight, fever lines on a graph, with dire or possibly not dire consequences — and it goes on from there: grades, friends, mood changes, body changes. Sometimes a kid is just underweight, and sometimes he needs to see a doctor. Sometimes a bad fight is just a bad fight, and sometimes it’s a precipitating event. As Klebold points out, not even good-enough parents can always see their children clearly.

In Oxford, countless people I spoke to framed the events leading up to November 30 as “a mental-health story”: kids falling apart in a desert of care, the same as everywhere else in the country, but in some ways worse. Even before the pandemic, administrators in Oxford schools had started to notice more fragility, anxiety, depression, and withdrawal among students. In the late 1990s, the Republican governor John Engler had closed three-quarters of Michigan’s psychiatric hospitals in a cost-cutting spree, leaving rural areas barren of psychiatric inpatient treatment for kids. There was some outpatient help available, but many families didn’t know where to find it “unless they were very savvy,” one administrator told me. When they did, wait times averaged four months. This backlog strained emergency rooms. “Every time a kid said, ‘If I don’t get an A on this spelling test, I’m going to kill myself or kill you’ or something,” she was sent to the ER, says Sheila Marcus, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan who runs a program that trains primary-care doctors in mental health. Ninety percent of the time, these kids were deemed “not a threat” and sent back to school.

At school, mental-health support was far from robust. Shawn Hopkins, Ethan’s guidance counselor, testified in court that he was one of four counselors at the high school looking after the needs of 1,800 kids. This gave him time to see each student for ten minutes once a year, barring crises. He was performing one or two suicide-risk assessments each month. Meanwhile, among certain parents, a mistrust of educators, institutions, and authority figures was growing — a stubborn sense of “You’re not going to tell me what to do with my kid,” as Rosemary Bayer put it.

During the pandemic, suicidality among kids in Michigan rose substantially, according to Marcus, and doctors were feeling panicked. They’d call her and say, “I have many patients who have guns in their home, who are depressed, who may be suicidal.” At OHS, guidance counselors were getting regularly pulled away to cover classrooms when teachers were sick, Hopkins testified. It was often impossible for teachers to assess kids’ well-being over Zoom. “We had eyes on the kids,” said Anita Qonja-Collins, the assistant superintendent of elementary instruction in Oxford, “but did we really have eyes on the kids?”

The Friday after Thanksgiving, James went down the road from East Street to Acme Shooting Goods and purchased the 9-mm. for $519.35 using his credit card. Ethan came along and waited while his father ticked a box attesting that he understood it was illegal to buy a gun for someone else and signed a form acknowledging that his new gun came with a safety lock.

The following Monday in English class, Ethan was looking at bullets on his phone. The teacher, alarmed, notified Pam Fine, the high school’s “restorative-practices coordinator,” and Fine called Ethan to her office for a meeting with herself and Hopkins. He didn’t know Ethan very well: They had met once over Zoom for scheduling and once in a hallway after a teacher said Ethan seemed “sad.”

After the meeting with Ethan, Fine left a message on Jehn’s phone. She let her know that she and Hopkins had just had a “really nice” conversation with Ethan, assuring him that “guns are a hobby for a lot of people, and shooting ranges, and that’s perfectly normal,” but that certain hobbies were better pursued at home. “He was great; he was like, ‘Yep, I get it,’ ” Fine said, her voice upbeat. “If you have any questions, you can supply me a call. Otherwise, I hope you have a great holiday.”

Jehn texted Ethan, “Seriously?? Looking up bullets in school??”

“What? Oh yah. I already went to the office for that,” Ethan replied. “Completely harmless. Teachers just have no privacy. They said I’m all good. This is nothing I should get in trouble about.”

“You’re not. They left me a voicemail.” And then, a wisecrack: “Did you at least show them a pic of your new gun?”

“No I didn’t show them the pic my god.” Ethan reiterated that it was harmless. “I guess the teachers can’t get their eyes off my screen smh.”

Jehn wrote, “Lol, I’m not mad you have to learn not to get caught.” She assured Ethan that he could listen to the voice-mail when he got home.

After school, Ethan and his parents had a terrible argument. In his journal, Ethan wrote, “The shooting is tomorrow, I have access to the gun and ammo.” He also addressed his parents: “I love you, Mom. I love you, Dad. I’m sorry for never saying it back.”

Previously, he had written in his journal about how he wanted a 9-mm. to “maximize the number of kills” and how he was “enlisting his own father” to get it for him, the prosecution said in a hearing for Ethan’s trial. After obtaining the gun, Ethan posted a photo of it on Instagram, calling the SIG Sauer “my new beauty.” Sometime that weekend, he also wrote in his journal, “I will have to find where my dad hid my 9-mm. before I can shoot the school.” In the early hours of Monday morning, at around 3 a.m., Jehn was on her phone, searching “research clinical depression treatment options.”

November 30 was a Tuesday, and it looked like snow. Jehn went to work, Ethan to school. The Crumbleys’ horse Billy had a fungus called mud fever, so James drove to the barn to put ointment on its legs. Jehn had plans to look at a property with colleagues and then go to the barn.

At 9:33 a.m., she texted James, “Call NOW. Emergency.” She texted again: “Emergency.” At 9:38, Jehn texted two photos of a math sheet Ethan had been working on that morning. During second period, the geometry teacher had walked past Ethan’s desk, and what she saw caused her such alarm that she took a photo with her phone and brought it to Nicholas Ejak, the dean of students. On his review of congruent triangles, Ethan had drawn a pistol almost exactly like the one his father had just bought. He had drawn a human figure filled with holes and a laughing-crying face. He had written, “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” And “Blood everywhere.” And “The world is dead.” By the time Hopkins arrived to pull him out of class, Ethan had scribbled out the gun, the bullet-riddled figure, and the dark phrases. He had written, “OHS Rocks!” And “I love my life so much!!!!” And “We’re all friends here.” And “Harmless act.”

“My god, WTF,” James texted Jehn when he saw the pictures.

“I’m very concerned,” Jehn wrote. She asked him to call her because she was headed to the school.

As Jehn drove, Hopkins and Ethan were having a talk. The geometry teacher wasn’t the only one who raised the alarm that morning. In first-period English, Ethan had been watching shootings on his phone; that teacher had alerted Hopkins as well. In court, Hopkins reported Ethan was compliant and understanding at first, but when asked to talk about drawings on the math sheet, Ethan grew “sad”: “He talked about how a family dog had died. He talked about how he had lost a grandparent, that COVID had been incredibly difficult for him.” Ethan mentioned his friend who wasn’t in school anymore and an argument he’d had the previous night with his parents. Hopkins did a standard suicide-risk assessment, he said. He asked Ethan whether he was a threat to himself or others.

Ethan reassured Hopkins. “I can see why this looks bad,” he responded, according to Hopkins. “I’m not going to do anything.”

In English, he was watching video games, Ethan explained. He hoped to be a video-game designer one day, and the pictures he drew on the math sheet were sketches for a video game. Nevertheless, Hopkins had decided to contact the parents, as “there was enough suicidal ideation to be concerned,” he said later in court. Still, “I did not ask him further questions about a plan.”

James and Jehn arrived together at the high school at about 10:30 and were guided into Hopkins’s office. Hopkins explained that he was worried about suicidality and gave them a list of local mental-health resources. James looked at the math sheet with Ethan, telling him he had them to talk to if he was upset and his journal to write in. Hopkins declared he wanted Ethan seen by a mental-health professional — today, if possible, he said. That’s when Jehn said “no,” according to Hopkins. “Today is not possible. We have to return to work,” she said. So Hopkins said he wanted Ethan seen within 48 hours, and he would be following up. The meeting ended “abruptly,” Hopkins said.

Everyone in Oxford would like to know exactly what went on in that meeting, for when all is said and done, the apportioning of blame and guilt can be found in those 15 minutes. In the preliminary exam, Hopkins said he had never seen parents so recalcitrant when informed that their child might be considering suicide. He felt, he said, that James hadn’t spoken up because he didn’t want to contradict Jehn. During cross-examination, Smith reminded Hopkins of his role as mandatory reporter. If he had felt Ethan were truly in danger, from himself or his parents, Hopkins would have been obligated to call CPS or 911 right away. He did not, nor did he or Ejak insist that Ethan be sent home. Over the subsequent months, nine civil lawsuits would be filed against the school. (The Oxford Community School District did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

Ejak had joined the meeting partway through, and it was he who determined there was no “discipline issue.” Had the school decided that Ethan had broken any rules, the meeting might have taken a different course — actions that could have included a suspension from school or a search of Ethan’s backpack. Instead, Ejak went to the geometry classroom, retrieved the backpack, and gave it to Ethan, who said he wanted to continue his day. Hopkins agreed, saying in court that he was worried above all for Ethan’s own safety and did not want him to be alone.

After the meeting with Hopkins, Jehn was revising her plans. She still wanted to come to the barn, she texted Pennock, but now she would be bringing Ethan along. Ethan “can’t be left alone,” and James was working that evening. Pennock lightly suggested Ethan might benefit from “horse therapy.”

“Let’s make him a cowboy,” Pennock texted.

“Lol mom goals for real!” Jehn replied.

Back at work, she ran into her boss in the copy room and told him she needed to find a therapist for Ethan. She passed by Amanda Holland’s desk, showed her the math sheet, and said she felt like a failure as a parent.

At 12:20, she texted Ethan. “You ok?”

“Yah I just got back from lunch.”

“You know you can talk to us and we won’t judge,” Jehn wrote.

“Ik. thank you. I’m sorry for that. I love you.” It was 12:42.

Although the parents of mass shooters are almost never charged with crimes, victims’ families frequently sue the parents for damages. Thirty-six lawsuits filed by the Columbine families named Sue Klebold and her ex-husband, Tom, as defendants. The families of 16 of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting sued the estate of the shooter’s mother. One of the Parkland survivors sued the shooter’s foster parents, saying they knew their foster son had guns but did not stop him from accessing them, as well as the estate of his deceased mother, saying she had failed to attend to his mental-health issues. These lawsuits are agonizing for the families of the victims, their loved ones reduced to payout sums, and they rarely have a deterrent effect.

Could a criminal case succeed in preventing future shootings in a way that these civil cases have not? The father of the Highland Park shooter, from July 2022, sponsored his son for a gun permit despite a suicide attempt and homicidal threats. The Buffalo shooter, from May 2022, worried online that his parents would find the guns he hid at home. The Uvalde shooter, from that same month, who lived with his grandparents, bought two assault rifles days after his 18th birthday. According to the Violence Project, the average age of a school shooter is 18, in legal terms an adult. Mass shooters tend to be older. To criminally prosecute the parents of an adult shooter, the state would have to show, say, evidence of aiding and abetting or conspiracy. In the 2018 Waffle House murders, the father of the 29-year-old shooter was convicted of unlawful delivery of a firearm.

In the U.S., the urgent desire to stop mass shootings — and gun violence in general — is met with almost total refusal in conservative state legislatures to pass laws or restrictions that make careless gun ownership a crime. “I don’t think there’s anything on the horizon that’s very encouraging,” says Allison Anderman, director of local policy at the Giffords Law Center. Meanwhile, 4.6 million children live in homes where loaded firearms are unlocked; a 2021 survey showed that 70 percent of parents believe they have sufficiently secured their weapons, while a third of their adolescent kids say they can find them within five minutes. In 2020, 4,368 kids died of gunshot wounds in America, making it the leading cause of childhood death. A third of these were suicides.

Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have passed Child Access Prevention laws that impose criminal penalties on people for inadequately guarding their guns from children. Some are very stringent, as in California, where it is illegal to negligently store a firearm that a child might access, even unloaded. Some are less so: In Illinois, criminal responsibility of the parent is invoked only if the child uses the weapon to kill or seriously hurt someone. A consortium at the University of Michigan found that when CAP laws are paired with felony enforcement, gun deaths among kids younger than 15 decrease by a quarter, but nationwide, most of these laws are decades old and lately pass only when a state legislature turns blue. After the Oxford shooting, Bayer introduced a CAP bill in the Michigan legislature for the third time, but it has little to no chance.

To prove gross negligence, McDonald is attempting to draw a causal chain between the Crumbleys’ behavior and the deaths of four teenagers, but one element interrupts it, and that is Ethan himself. McDonald has charged him as an adult. He resides in an adult jail and faces adult penalties. In a February hearing related to Ethan’s trial, prosecutors painted him as highly intelligent, calculating, and deceitful. “In public, you have to put on a mask to blend in,” Ethan once wrote to his friend. (According to court documents, he may be planning an insanity defense.)

The parents and child face different trials and consequences, but their narratives overlap. Can McDonald prove both that the shooter is adultlike, and thereby responsible for four counts of first-degree murder, and that his parents are directly responsible? The case of the Crumbley parents will be decided on the interpretive fine points. Did James and Jehn outright buy their minor son a gun, as the prosecution attests? Or did they “give” him a gun, in the sense that other parents might supply a child a car or a precious piece of jewelry under stipulations of technical parental ownership and control? Does the responsibility for Ethan’s possession of the gun that day rest on his parents for failing to secure the gun or on him for taking it?

If McDonald wins, it will be in part because of the community’s yearning for “a pound of flesh,” as University of Michigan Law School professor Frank Vandervort puts it. But legal precedent is a way of articulating community standards, and Vandervort worries about a conviction eroding a fundamental principle of the law: “I’m responsible for what I do, and I’m not responsible for what you do.” It’s one thing to hold an adult criminally responsible for the actions of a young child, but it’s another thing to shift criminal responsibility onto the parents of a teenager. “In some sense, for every teenager who commits a crime, you can point the finger at the parent,” Vandervort says. “You didn’t get therapy. You didn’t see the behavioral problems. What if your teenager takes your car, drinks, and kills someone? Are you going to be held responsible? Every parent who looks at this case must in some way say, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ ”

Primus, the University of Michigan Law School professor, also points out that, as gun possession becomes more criminalized, arrests and punishments will land disproportionately on Black and brown parents. She notes that Christopher Head, the defendant in the precedent-setting gross-negligence gun case in Michigan, is Black. “What happened at that school is awful. Obviously, Ethan Crumbley has to answer for that,” Primus says. “But I worry about the expanding criminal footprint.”

James, driving for DoorDash on Route 24, saw police cars streaming toward the school and rushed home to look for the gun. It was just after one. He called Ethan, who didn’t pick up. He called Jehn. From ten feet down the hall, her boss heard Jehn scream. “I saw her, Mrs. Crumbley, say there was an active shooter at her child’s school and she had to go,” Andrew Smith said in court.

Between 1:17 and 1:18, James called Ethan three more times. At the same time, Jehn was texting their son. “I love you too,” she wrote, in response to Ethan’s previous message. Then, “You ok?”

At 1:22, she sent him another text: “Ethan don’t do it.”

About ten minutes later, James, from East Street, called 911, his voice strained and frantic. “I have a missing gun at my house,” he said. He tried to explain about the counselor and the math sheet, how he was driving and heard about an active-shooter situation at the school. “I raced home just to, like, find out, and I think my son took the gun. I don’t know if it’s him. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m, like, really freaking out.” The Crumbleys say they feared suicide; McDonald says they must have been imagining homicide: Hundreds of parents rushed to the Meijer supermarket to pick up their kids that day, and afterward, McDonald would note the Crumbleys were the only ones who went home to look for their gun. Sue Klebold says sometimes the impulses for suicide and homicide are interwoven. A child throws his own life away by inflicting his suffering on others.

Hana St. Juliana was 14 years old. She was joyful, with a sarcastic sense of humor, a volleyball and basketball player, and close with her family, especially her older sister. She loved Christmas and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Madisyn Baldwin was 17. She loved Monster drinks and was smart and shy and an incredible artist. She doodled on everything, including gum wrappers, and had already been accepted to several colleges on full scholarship. Tate Myre, No. 42 on the football team, was a leader; even adults quieted when he spoke. “You had no choice but to follow him and do the right thing,” says Mike Aldred. Justin Shilling, co-captain of the bowling team, “was smart beyond his years, hilarious without even trying,” said his close friend Olivia McMillan when she stood up at a school-board meeting. He died the day after the shooting, and two days later, a vigil gathered at McLaren hospital as his body was taken off life support and wheeled into an operating theater where he donated his organs.

The 2015 FBI report on preventing mass violence defines leakage as the messages a prospective shooter sends, like a bread-crumb trail, to signal his intentions. Leakage can come in the form of obvious statements, in conversation or social-media posts, but it can also be subtle or private: the theme of an art project, between the lines of an essay, an item on a scribbled to-do list found in the aftermath.

The night of the 30th, after the shooting, Jehn was on a burner phone texting with Pennock about selling her horses. “Thanks for not judging, unlike the whole world,” she wrote.

“I know you and James and this doesn’t even remotely make me think it was your fault,” Pennock wrote back.

“I wish we had warnings. Something. He’s a good kid. They made a terrible decision.”

“There probably were warnings but nobody saw them,” Pennock responded. “Hindsight is always 20/20.”

After the shooting, when East Street became a crime scene, a police detective took photographs of the house. The kitchen was orderly, with a bread box on the counter, and coffee cups on a shelf, and new bags of pet food on the island. In the master bedroom, the detective photographed the unmade bed. A pair of pajama pants lay entangled with the sheets, the empty SIG Sauer case on top.

Ethan inhabited two bedrooms off the kitchen in the house, his belongings spread so completely across both that it was impossible to tell where he slept. In the photos, the rooms are spilling over with laundry and junk. Full and empty bottles of soda and water, stuffed animals, underwear, lip balm, and a geometry text are strewn over two beds. On one wall hang two giant shooting-range targets in the shape of human torsos, which are riddled with holes. There are also old soccer trophies and medals and model schooners on a shelf; toy airplanes and cars and a miniature Packers helmet crowd the nightstand along with a collectible Nazi coin and a small dish of bullets.