'Mourn today, act tomorrow.' New Seattle Schools superintendent emphasizes safety following fatal shooting near South Shore

It’s safe to say Ben Shuldiner’s first day as superintendent of Seattle Public Schools wasn’t what he’d expected.

Shuldiner, a longtime educator and district leader who comes to Washington’s largest public school district from Michigan, was supposed to take his oath of office and officially start work on Monday.

Instead, he spent the weekend responding to the shooting deaths of two teenage boys killed at a bus stop near South Shore PreK-8 and Rainier Beach High School on Friday afternoon, about half an hour after school had let out for the day.

The victims are believed to have been students in the district, but the Seattle Police Department has not yet identified them.

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During his oath of office Monday — an event that was more somber than celebratory, as the district had originally planned — Shuldiner said he’d spent Sunday evening driving and walking around in the rain in the Rainier Beach neighborhood, where the shooting occurred.

“I could only think about the tragedy that befell our community — but that, even within that tragedy, there’s hope,” Shuldiner said. “As the rain falls — which they tell me happens quite often here — I could imagine it kind of mixing with the tears that our children and families cried, both on Friday and throughout the weekend.”

”And I could imagine that that water — together, collectively — mixes so that we can grow new things,” he continued. “So that we can, as a community, rise above what has happened and work collectively to do what is right for this community, for our children, and for society at large.”

Shuldiner said he’s more determined than ever to do his part to improve student safety and security, across the district and throughout the city.

“What occurred is horrible, and we have to do a better job as a school district, we have to do a better job as a community in trying to make sure things like this don’t happen,” Shuldiner told KUOW’s Soundside. “This cannot be about hopes and prayers. This has to be about mourning today and acting tomorrow.”

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Even before the shooting, Shuldiner had named boosting school safety and security as one of his top priorities.

“As a superintendent, safety and security is paramount,” Shuldiner said in an interview with KUOW’s Soundside before Friday’s shooting. “It’s pretty hard to learn if you’re not safe and secure … So my commitment is to try to make the district as safe as we possibly can.”

How will he accomplish that? Shuldiner plans to draw on his experiences as superintendent of the Lansing School District in Central Michigan.

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When he arrived in Lansing, Shuldiner said it had been named the 13th most dangerous city in America based on murder rates at the time.

“We worked with the community very, very closely about how can we deal with some of those issues? And now, five years later, [Lansing] schools are incredibly safe,” Shuldiner said.

Shuldiner said he focused on ensuring Lansing schools met the “gold standard” of safety and security. That meant ensuring every school has a single point of entry, Shuldiner said, plus installing security cameras, fences, and bullet-resistant film on windows.

Something else Seattle could consider: Metal detectors. In Lansing, every high school had them, and Shuldiner said the community was “overwhelmingly supportive” of it.

“A lot of times when you talk to families and kids, they want that because they know that they’ll feel safe,” he said. “It’s not about … criminalizing our kids. It’s the opposite.”

At this point, Shuldiner is not sold on the idea of bringing resource officers back into Seattle schools.

In the wake of several high-profile police killings, Seattle joined a number of school districts across the nation in indefinitely halting programs that stationed armed officers at school campuses in 2020.

In October 2025, the Seattle School Board opted not to revive the controversial program on a one-year trial basis at Garfield High School, after a deadly shooting outside the school heightened community calls to improve student safety there and across the district.

RELATED: No cops at Garfield High. Seattle School Board rejects plan to revive resource officer program

Although Shuldiner believes every school district should have an “incredibly strong relationship” with its local police, “there’s not necessarily as much of a need” for an armed police officer inside a school.

“The school district’s job is to make sure that the school itself is safe and protected,” Shuldiner said. “If you need [police], you call them and they come and you should have that relationship.”

However, Shuldiner said he does support having unarmed public safety officers in schools — something he had in Lansing.

But, Shuldiner said, it’s important that these officers receive extensive training and don’t have the power of arrest.

“If you have public safety officers that work for the district, you can kind of work with them. What do they do? They're going to listen to the principal,” he explained. “A police officer, they work for the police department. That’s their job. They have their own rules and responsibilities. That's very different from the way schools work.”