APRIL 1999
It must've been April, and the bus must've been late. The only time I ever saw the headlines at the beginning of Good Morning America was if our bus was late.The adults played pretty good defense, but as a first grader, I saw the footage of the kids crying, running out of the school with their hands on their heads.
It's a shame I didn't even have two years of school under my belt before I learned that guns and school sometimes go together despite everything I knew saying otherwise.
School security changed some after that. I had to trade my 101 Dalmatian bookbag for a see-through one, but I can't remember any other ways things changed for me. Thankfully, the next few years were pretty uneventful for me and my little red mesh backpack.
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OCTOBER 2001
A month after finding out about terrorists flying airplanes into buildings to hurt people from a younger kid on the bus, tensions were still pretty high. Despite my best eavesdropping ever since the announcement cancelling after school activities "due to what was going on in our country" on September 11, the teachers hadn't cracked. I had no idea how they were feeling, what kept them going in the days that followed. I did notice a new sense of urgency when an announcement was made again in October.I can't remember if the announcement overshared or if I got details from a teacher. I can't remember if this was before or after the lockdown for a robbery in the area, but I do remember they were about a week apart. I remember we went into lockdown because some vehicles went "missing" from the arsenal across town. Protocols still weren't the best as I remember hiding under a light blue couch in the reading corner of my fourth grade classroom...right under one window and in clear view of another.
All was well and it was just a miscommunication at the arsenal, but after this, drills became commonplace.
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APRIL 2006
It was almost five years before I can remember feeling nervous at school again (as long as we don't count that time in seventh grade I had to figure out how to get a giant reindeer from my "boyfriend" home from an away basketball game without anyone asking questions...) In spring of eighth grade, a twangy voice came over the intercom and instructed us to go into a soft lockdown. We couldn't go anywhere and we moved away from the door, but we could pretend to keep learning. Mr. Cox had the difficult job of locking the door while trying to convince us to care about the graphing polynomials. The super mature thirteen year olds that we were were equal parts nervous about the lockdown and embarrassed for him as he passed out scissors and called them "weapons of math instruction."Again, we were given the all clear, but the 10-15 minutes before that dragged on. The more time without information, the more everyone--teacher included--seemed to get concerned. Finally, we were told the suspicious person they had received a call about was a bus driver walking around the edge of campus. We would live on another day to be dramatic, get in trouble for having pockets on our clothing, and earn 2000 word reports for chewing gum.
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Once we got to high school, things got a little more serious.
AUGUST 2007
Less than a month into sophomore year, a fire alarm went off during our first It turns out it was bomb threat evacuation. According to the article I found to decide what month this all went down, it was the fourth bomb threat since school started three weeks prior. We marched outside and waited for a few minutes. They decided, yep, some teenager didn't want to take a test/go to school, and we were told to go back inside and switch classes.
That's when a fight broke out. The fight moved into the gym lobby as we were all heading back into the school. Someone yelled that they saw a gun. People were pepper-sprayed. There was chaos, and then there was calm.
The local media picked up the story and ran with it because of our school's reputation, and friends from church (who happen to go to our rival school) start texting to ask if it was true that the Crips really did a drive-by at our school.
The possibility of there being a gun was scary, but we were all taken care of and no one got hurt. My second period English teacher was freaked out. Understandable. We weren't really sure what to do so the thirty of us in that class mostly just long blinked at her as she nervously vented to fifteen year olds about overcrowding for the duration of the block. Third period, two kids were late because they had been rinsing their eyes to try to get out the pepperspray. By fourth period, things were mostly business as usual. At dismissal there were extra police officers in addition to Hot Cop. (Just kidding, I don't know if he was there that day. I just wanted to throw that in there for fellow SHS survivors/Hot Cop fans.) The police presence was high, the local news station were there to intercept the students/parents who would make our school look the worst, and the rest of us hightailed it out of there.
Nothing too lasting happened that day. It just reminded me that school might not be as safe as I believed. Now, I am thankful that we were only evacuated because some kids wanted to go outside and fight.
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Senior year, things got real.
FEBRUARY 2010
One Friday afternoon I headed from school to my church, a good 20-30 minute drive since the church is right next to another high school and I hit their dismissal traffic too. Traffic was a little heavy so I took the back way. When I showed up at church, I heard the news.There had been a shooting at the middle school just down the street.
What?
A shooting?
With a gun?
At a middle school?
The middle school my friends had gone to?
The one I practiced basketball at?
The one lots of youth group kids had been at that day?
Details came out little by little.
There was one shooter.
One victim.
One fatality.
It certainly could have been worse, but isn't one family's worst nightmare more than enough?
Todd had gone to the same school as me before he moved to Discovery.
The city schools were supposed to be the nice ones.
We were the school people expected to have violence.
We were the school peoples' parents from other schools wouldn't their kids come to for football games because of the threat of violence.
Something like a week before, U.S. News & World Report had ranked the town the best place in the nation to live. Growing industry. Low cost of living. Great schools.
And then there was a child killed in a school in that great town.
Our great town.
We comforted ourselves by rationalizing that it was an isolated incident.
Bullying? Inattentive parents?
Yeah, sure. Let's talk about all that instead of the fact that a kid murdered another at school.
Todd lost his life. His parents lost their child. His best friends lost their best friend.
And what about the psyches of the others at Discovery that day? The kids who were in the hall with them? The kids who saw things no one should ever see regardless of age? The teachers who were responsible for covering the standards and helping rehabilitate a community in the aftermath?
Time tends to help us gloss over pain, but it was too much for our little town.
And then it happened again just a week later.
This time it was on the college campus in town. A professor sat in a meeting with her peers, then stood up and shot six people. Three died.
Guns. Schools. Shooting. Death.
Sadness. Anger. Empty talk.
Return to normalcy. Pretend it was a fluke. Pretend it didn't happen.
Until it happens again.
In 1999, it was a shock. Now--these places, these children, these actual people--are just another headline for a week or so until something else happens.
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NOVEMBER 2013
My student teaching was pretty great. I loved my cooperating teachers, loved my kids. I laughed a lot. I laughed when the class interrupted calendar with a peer pressure chant of "Bluemeier! Bluemeier!" until I changed into a blue crayon costume on Halloween. I laughed once I recovered from a power struggle with my guy TP in which he passionately yelled, "MY BUTT'S ABOUT TO DO SOMETHING!" while I was explaining what he would have to do before getting a chance to go to the restroom/away from me. You laugh so you don't cry in kindergarten.
I didn't go to a ton of meetings at that school, but every now and then we had after school meetings with this intense school resource officer. She talked about school shootings nearly every meeting, and she talked about how we needed to have a can drive so that we could arm students with canned goods to throw at an intruder. Her logic was even if they didn't hurt the intruder, 20+ things being hurled at them would at least make things more difficult. The officer also encouraged us to barricade the classroom doors. She was intense, she was scary, but at least everything she talked about was just to keep in the back of our minds.
Until the day we actually had to do it.
I thank God I hadn't pulled my boys to the resource room. Everyone was still together in the inclusion class. Ms. Franklin locked the door and closed the blinds. We pushed tables and desks in front of the door. We ushered the two dozen kindergarteners under a table away from tables and doors. We hushed them. Pleaded with them to be quiet. We passed out wooden blocks, one for each hand. We didn't have cans, and the blocks were the heftiest things we had.
And then we waited. I felt my throat in the pit of my stomach, and I prayed. Ms. Franklin checked her phone. Nothing. The minutes ticked by. Slowly, we got sprinklings of news. It was a real lockdown. Someone heard sirens. A high schooler from across the street was reported as leaving campus and heading our way. Some classes had seen a man in a mask wielding something outside their classroom windows.
The minutes turned to hours. Miraculously, the kids stayed calm and no one peed on himself or anyone else. I had some peace knowing my boys had fallen asleep under the table, but I still felt like I was going to throw up. And then I heard yelling. And heavy footsteps running. It's a wonder I didn't pass out or vomit right there. Then, banging on our door. We froze. The doorknob jingled, but thankfully it did not open. More banging. And then nothing.
We remained huddled, silent for probably another thirty minutes. Had a shooter really gotten into our building? Did the stack of furniture really prevent them from getting to us? Is everyone else okay? When will we get the all clear announcement?
From here, things are a blur. There was no announcement to say we were okay, but after several texts from different people and an email or two, we determined that the lockdown was really over. We debriefed with the police after school, but they never did spell out exactly what happened. Super comforting to all involved, let me tell you. From what we pieced together, we believe the man in the mask was a pest control man with some pest-removing wand/gun thing. As for the banging and jingle jangling, we think that was supposed to be the police unlocking the door and giving us the all clear, but we barricaded thing so well the door wouldn't open at all.
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JULY 2015
I had committed, but I hadn't gotten my contract yet. Still, they put my name on the map. Six times smaller than the font used for anyone else's name, there in the lower right corner, I saw it.My first thought? "Wow, I can't believe they are really going to trust me to be the one in charge."
My second thought? "Man. That is really close to the door. If anything happens, I'm the first one to go."
I hadn't even gotten to bask in the excitement of landing my first job. Instead of planning out fun lessons and starting my book collection, I'm imagining having to protect my kids just like the special education teacher did at Sandy Hook.
I'll do it if I have to, but I didn't get into education to be a [not-so-]bulletproof vest.
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Three years later, I feel the same way. I adore my kids. I would be devastated if anything happened to any of them. At school? More than one kid? Don't make me imagine it. I cannot go there.I remember being scared as a student, and I don't want to live in fear as a teacher.
I don't know the answer.
I don't know where we go from here.
But I do remember the scared little girl in elementary school when they explained why we had to trade my faded blue jean Dalmatian backpack for a mesh one.
I remember the self-confident teenager melting into a helpless kid, jumping, almost peeing on myself when I saw a stranger in a dark jacket in the hall when I left calculus to use the restroom in the months after the shootings senior year.
The stranger--afraid of me--jumped too.
And now?
Now I try to pretend I'm not aware that to lock my door and protect my class in case of an emergency, I have to go out into the hallway.
I try to pretend that in addition to being a teacher and song leader and booboo fixer and behavior manager and bathroom patrolwoman I am also a big, brave mama bear.
I would give anything to make sure none of my students ever have to feel afraid at school.
They are six. They should be afraid of falling from the incredible height of the monkey bars, of the tooth fairy not coming, of spelling tests. Not of bad people bringing guns to their school.
If you don't want to take it from Me the Kid or Me the Teacher, please take the time to listen to some of the students who are rising up and speaking out. If you could do something to prevent someone from being scared, someone from getting hurt, someone from getting murdered, wouldn't you?
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My system released a statement saying kids might act out in protest because they feel voiceless. I disagree. These kids have taken to heart all the times people have told them a single voice matters, that someone has to start each revolution. These students are protesting precisely because they know they have a voice, and if adults won't stand up and use ours for fear of conflict, of the politically correct, of some other dumb reason, then we've left them no choice but to stand up and speak out.We are tempted to forget, but we have to remember. Remember Columbine, remember Sandy Hook, remember Stoneman Douglas. Remember, and then stand up and do something about it so that never again really means never again.
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