Where Do We Go From Here?

When the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary happened on December 14, 2012, I was teaching a first/second-grade combined class. It happened on what was the last day of school before the winter recess for my school district. We were in our own little world here on the west coast, and most of us didn’t learn anything about it until we were home after letting go of our students for the next three weeks. Upon our return from the winter recess, our first professional development meeting revolved around the protocols of dealing with an active shooter on campus. Our principal discussed how she was working with the school district to get a more secure front door to the school, and how a wall was going to be built to deny access to the main hallway from the front door so that anyone entering school would have to go through the office to access classrooms. We talked about the multiple gates that would no longer be used for dismissal, and how our new protocol was to keep our classroom doors closed and locked at all times. One of my colleagues recognized and said what none of us wanted to say out loud — that if someone was hell-bent on getting into the school to harm anyone on campus, that person was going to find a way to do it.  For the first time in my career, I noticed a fear for our safety from my colleagues. For the first time in my career, I did not feel safe at school.

Now, I can’t speak for any of my colleagues at the time, but even with this new feeling of distrusting the safety of  my work environment, I have never thought to myself that I would feel better if I was trained to use a firearm at school and to have that firearm stored in my classroom. Nothing seems more impractical to me than to have a gun stored in an elementary school classroom! Standing in the doorway of my bungalow classroom that was situated next to a chain-link fence that anyone could hop over, I assessed how I would hide my students if we needed to shelter in place and how I could get my little seven- and eight-year-olds to run for their lives if we needed to escape. My job was to be their leader and protector. Having a gun in my classroom would only take my focus away from my students because I would have to focus on the person(s) who has(have) put us in danger. As a teacher, my focus needs to always be on my students.

We now find ourselves facing another school shooting — this time at a high school. And, the idea of having armed teachers has resurfaced. Just writing the term “armed teachers” makes me very uncomfortable. But, we need to have this discussion on how to keep our schools — public and private, preschool to university — and the lives that make those schools the living, breathing centers of enlightenment and exploration that they are safe. Where do we go from here? There is no map. We will have to work together and listen to one another to create our own map to safe schools.