Should We Do More? Penn State recently announced that it will pay $59.7 million to 26 sexual abuse victims of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. In Connecticut, families of (coincidentally) 26 victims who lost their lives in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown last year will receive $281,000 each. Twelve surviving children who witnessed the murders will receive $20,000 each, and two surviving teachers who were injured will receive $75,000 each. Two completely different situations, of course, on many levels. The Penn State payouts were to living victims, made under the threat of lawsuits, paid mostly by the university’s general liability insurance policies. Negligence and cover-ups are alleged. Multiple people in positions of authority might have stopped the abuse from happening and did not. Payments to the families of Sandy Hook victims came from a charitable fund that raised more than $7 million from private individuals in the wake of the shooting. It has nothing to do with litigation, and there’s no government entity or taxpayer dollars involved. And how do you put a price tag on either situation? But the disparity begs the question: Have we, as a community, state and nation, done enough to help those most directly affected by what happened in Newtown? Why should the families of children who were victims of something horrific at a public elementary school in Connecticut get 1/10th of the financial support of children who were victims of something horrific at a publicly funded university in Pennsylvania? Why does one public institution pay victims, but not the other? Is it solely the threat of lawsuits in Penn State’s case? Or are we saying that there is absolutely nothing that the public schools, the town, the police and the state could have done to stop or prevent Sandy Hook? (Even as we have spent the past year talking about and passing legislation related to gun control, mental-health treatment and school security in hopes of preventing the next one.) Penn State is an institution with a lot of money. It can afford to pay $59 million to help a group of young men it failed miserably. So can the state of Connecticut, with an annual budget of more than $20 billion. We can’t bring the Sandy Hook families’ children back. We probably can’t even give a decent answer as to why this happened or how it could have been prevented. But we have the resources and the responsibility to do better than $281,000 for each family whose lives, and in many cases, livelihood, were destroyed—families who have given their time and experiences to help shape public policy and help the community at-large heal even as their worlds have been destroyed. We can do better than $20,000 for children who have decades of psychological treatment and healing ahead of them. We should also be doing something for educators and first responders so torn apart by what they saw that day that they cannot work, like Newtown police officer Thomas Bean, who faces potential termination from the force because of his severe PTSD. The cost would be a fraction of the sums of money we sink into elective public works projects, infrastructure and subsidies of big business that provide a questionable return on taxpayer investment. The mechanism is simple: Sponsor special legislation in the General Assembly earmarking whatever dollar amount experts in this field think makes sense. Benchmarking against the average Penn State settlement and similar cases would be a good starting point. Should every victim of a crime that takes place in a public building or associated with a public institution be compensated? No. If there ever was a clear exception, though, it would be what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012. The impact on the victims’ families, survivors, first responders and educators is mind-boggling. And the need for our state and nation to do something about what happened that day has been clear. Part of that response should be to take care of those most directly affected. Matt DeRienzo mderienzo@21st-centurymedia.com Twitter.com/mattderienzo Contributors “LESSONS FROM SANDY HOOK” (PAGE 12) Jennifer Swift is state politics reporter for Connecticut Magazine. Most recently, she was the New Haven city hall and education reporter for the New Haven Register, and prior to that covered East Haven and Branford for the paper. THE TALE OF CASTLE WOODSTOCK” (PAGE 44) Erik Ofgang is a freelance writer who lives in New Fairfield. He writes about history, science, politics and the arts, and is pursuing his MFA in Creative and Professional Writing from Western Connecticut State University. When he’s not writing he can be seen playing bass with the Celtic roots band MacTalla Mor. “POWDER RIDGE RISES AGAIN” (PAGE 48) Viktoria Sundqvist is the investigations editor for The Middletown Press and The Register Citizen, sister publications of Connecticut Magazine, where she carries out in-depth reporting and investigative journalism with a focus on Freedom of Information issues in the state. Follow her on Twitter @vsundqvist or @ctfoi.