It’s a Wednesday night, entering into Thursday morning and I’m sitting here with a pit in my stomach filled with stone. Another school shooting. Another group of students and teachers shot and killed. More students and teachers and parents traumatized by a gunman walking into an Elementary School and opening fire. The stories are always slightly different, but they are EXACTLY THE SAME.
It was a 1999 when school shootings entered my world, when we all watched the horrors of Colombine unfold. I was 12. Even then I didn’t really understand it and the effects weren’t really there yet, not for me at least. I remember that year my aunt gave everyone clear backpacks for Christmas because her kids’ school had mandated them in an effort to make school “safer”. It sat in my closet for a few years until it was finally donated in one purge or another. Even as a kid, I thought, “How the hell are clear backpacks supposed to help?” This was the same year Never Been Kissed came out and we saw Drew Barrymore walk through metal detectors and have her metal nail file confiscated, “This is a weapon…” That was a weapon…
I was in high school and we started doing drills. At my high school if you heard “Polar Bear Swim-a-thon” you were to go into lockdown procedures. I don’t remember anyone taking it too seriously. A. the name of our lockdown procedure was inadvertently funny. B. this kind of thing wouldn’t happen in my town…right? I’d known all of my classmates for years. We grew up in the same small sheltered town in Massachusetts. This couldn’t possibly happen here. Senior year, there were a few bomb threats, but it was chalked up to someone wanting to get out of class.
It’s a Monday in April, 2007. I’m in classes at Suffolk University, enjoying a newfound freedom in both my personal and educational existence. Then we hear about a shooting at Virginia Tech. I heard the story of Liviu Librescu, a professor and Holocaust survivor, who propped the door to his lecture closed so his student’s could escape to safety. I was heartbroken for everyone involved, for this man who lost his life saving his students, for the fear that these things brought. But, I went to Suffolk. We didn’t even really have a campus and it just didn’t seem like a necessary worry.
It’s a Friday in December 2012. I had just finished teaching my class and went to check my mailbox in the front office. My friend who was the school’s secretary had a look on her face. There were a bunch of people huddled in the front office. That’s how I learned about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Sitting in a school 80 miles away, thinking about how close it felt and how different it felt this time. I wasn’t a student fearing for my life, I was a teacher. These kids were my kids. I read about the victims but this time I saw myself in Victoria Soto, who died protecting her students. She was only 27 years old, two years my senior. I went home that Christmas and had a conversation with my family that if anything like that happened at my school, there was a good chance I wouldn’t make it home. That if forced to make that choice, I would protect my students with my life. This is a conversation and a choice educators should not have to make.
It was around 2015-6 when we had a lockdown drill in the school that I vividly remembered because I found a student in the hall a full day afterwards shaking and crying. When I asked what was wrong, they couldn’t tell me. They couldn’t say. They’re older sister was walking by so I let her take him to a quiet area to calm him down and we’d get him back to class. She later told me that after the lockdown drill he was so terrified that this could happen here. He was so scared that this was real. Who has the heart to try to explain to a shaking, traumatized, terrified 12 year old that this is, absolutely, a reality. Around the same time, students were speaking about lockdowns and I told them to take it very seriously, to always look for escape routes, and to never look back. I told my students that they are, under no circumstances, to check on me but to run like hell. I told my students point blank that I would hold the door no matter what. One student looked confused and asked what I meant. One his classmates said outright, “She is going to be our shield…even if it means standing between us and a gun.” She was right…but God almighty is that a horrible thing for a student to understand.
It’s the 2018-2019 school year, and I’m teaching in Morocco. A student jokes about guns, keeps picking things up and pretending to shoot people. When it happens, my whole body tenses up. I sit everyone down and explain that this is not something that we should be joking about. This is not something “fun” but something that is really, REALLY, scary where I come from. Students literally cannot understand or contemplate how this could possibly be the reality that I grew up in or that I taught in before.
It’s 2022 and it’s happened again. I’m on the phone and someone asks me reluctantly if I’ve heard. My response, “Oh…the school shooting…” Even I am horrified at my reaction, but I literally have to shut down when these things happen until I am back in the privacy of my own home and have the time and energy to sit and cry and process.
It. Just. Keeps. Happening. Again. And. Again.
And every time it happens, “Thoughts and Prayers” roll in….but absolutely NOTHING CHANGES. Nothing. If people mention gun control it’s “stop politicizing the deaths of children”. If people say anything other than “THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS” they are somehow disrespectful? People come out of the woodwork to say, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” “It’s not the guns, it’s mental health in this country!” or “Even if we ban guns, people will get them illegally and then only the criminals will have guns!”
I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know what we should do to fix this. I just know that I am an educator and I am so tired and so sad and so heartbroken and I’m writing this while blinking back sobs because I am so tired of seeing kids in the crosshairs and I’m so sick of teachers having to become martyrs to save the lives of their students. It’s heartbreaking. It’s horrific. It’s inhumane. It needs to stop. This has been going on for so long…and it just needs to stop. We could really use a hero right about now…if only they were real. So for now, hug your kids tight. Pray that they make it to adulthood, I guess. Thoughts and Prayers.
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