Thoughts after the active threat drill

I learned new terms today: "Ineffective Barricade" and "Students Not Ready To Counter".

I hate them.

I hate that our public school students need to learn things like "How to construct an effective barricade in diverse situations" or "How to counter an active shooter with whatever crap happens to be at hand". These should not be topics that our students are tasked with learning, but in 21st Century America - a place rife with weapons designed solely for the purpose of ending human life, a place that suffers from a dearth of mental health care options - these topics are exactly the kinds of things our teachers are charged with exploring with the young people with whom they work.

Something strange came over me as I escorted one of our city's police officers through our assigned section of this massive high school campus. As we approached the first door we were assigned to check, I thought, "Whatever we're about to face is what a shooter would face." The officer keyed the lock and gave the door a shove. Something was blocking it. Something large. But the something was on wheels, and as he used more force, it began to roll awkwardly. We could not penetrate the room. However, as we shut the door back again, the officer mused, "If I'd wanted to get in there, I could have. Ineffective barricade." I tagged the door with a Post-It Note and noted the critique on my clipboard. As we approached the next door into which we had watched two students and a teacher duck just moments before, I became the shooter. In my mind, I thought, "Whoever we find in here is a goner." The officer keyed the lock. He pushed the door, and it swung open.

There stood a teacher and two students surrounded by laundry machines and cabinets. "What would you have done if I were the shooter?" he asked. The teacher protested that, if this hadn't been a drill, if it were real, they would have blocked the door with the washing machine. "Then you should have blocked the door with the washing machine. We do what we practice." He closed the door amidst more the beginnings of further protest, started down the hall, looked over his shoulder and said, "Ineffective barricade. Not ready to counter."

And they were gone. In my mind, we had just discovered our first three casualties.

We found more people on our route. All I could think each time we saw a person was that that child was another casualty. It was horrible.

The map above shows the 11 mass school shootings that have occurred in the United States since the devastating afternoon in 1999 when two students entered Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado and began indiscriminately shooting their classmates. That day is largely the reason our school has evolved to a point at which "Active Threat Drills" have been added to the severe weather drills that schools have always carried out as part of their safety plans.

This past April 20 marked the twenty year anniversary since that tragic day, and since that day and the publication of the map above, there has been another shooting in Colorado, this time, at the STEM School Highlands Ranch outside of Denver. And since that anniversary, a survivor of the Columbine massacre, Austin Eubanks, lost his own life to the opioid addiction that was an aftereffect of the therapies and treatments he received following the shooting.

We need to decide that enough is enough. We need to reach out to our children and build authentic relationships with them now, and we need to never, ever stop. We need to make that the first focus of our task as educators, not an afterthought that may or may not occur organically and will be wonderful if it does but negligible if it doesn't.

Because our children have to stop feeling like they're negligible. They have to feel a sense of connection to the community to which they belong, and that connection needs to be a positive one that reminds them constantly that they matter.

My plea is not for gun legislation. If that happens, fine, but it will only maybe cure a symptom of this terrible, terrible problem. It will not address the cause. My plea is not for armed teachers. "Teacher ready to counter" is not something that I even want to think about because all I see when I read that is "Teacher ready to kill a student", and that is antithetical to what I believe is the solution of this problem.

We have to start with the children. We have to face them and talk with them and offer them trust and cherish whatever trust they return. We have to build them up, so whether they're the popular kid or the weird kid or the athlete or the class clown, they know that they have a place in their community of learners and that that place makes them valuable to the rest of us.

The time for building up our school community is now. The time for teachers and administrators to train in and implement restorative practices is now. It's already too late for far too many. But we have a chance to save the survivors and those who will come after them.