The plan was to wait, but at breakfast one of your kids asks what we’re doing today. You try to sound as level as possible as you remind your class about the fire and earthquake drills from earlier in the week. They buzz and chatter about crawling under the table and walking to the yard on the other side of the school. You pause for a moment and they fall silent when you tell them, “Today, we’re going to practice what to do if a bad person with a gun comes to our classroom to hurt us.”
The active shooter drill is announced thirty minutes before lunch. You turn the lights off and whisper with all the solemnity you can gather and instruct your twenty four- and five-year-olds to sit in front of the toy shelves. You show them how to crouch and you watch their little bodies bend over and you feel like you heart is going to explode.
In the dark you sit, and sit, and sit, and sit, and one of your babies starts to shake. “It’s okay,” another baby tells him. “It’s okay, it’s not real.” But he keeps shaking.
Schools have always been sites of violence. Children poisoned by their teachers with smallpox and buried by their classrooms. Children screamed at by their classmates’ mothers and fathers for walking into the school building. Children reported and deported out of their communities and away from their families. Children picked up and slammed down on to their own desks.
Then, the everyday injustices. Slurs and jeers. Punches and slaps. Belittling and isolation. Molestation and abuse.
Nevertheless, gun violence has its own tinge. Its randomness, its severity, its capacity for volume, all making it a particular type of horror amongst a sea of horrors.
A few weeks later after the drill, a 13-year-old boy is shot at a school in your district. Almost a month to the day later, there is another shooting in your district, wounding six adults.
This is just how we live. This is just how we live.
You’re ten and on vacation with your family. You go to your room for a nap and turn on the television to something called Elephant. You wait for the animals to show up and suddenly, you see a teenager open fire on his classmates. Almost two decades later, just seeing the poster makes you nauseous.
You’re twenty-six and days away from the end of your second year of teaching. You start to see texts coming in from people asking how you’re doing, and you check the news and read that nineteen fourth-graders and their two teachers have been gunned down in Texas. Your co-worker tells you the next day that when she heard the news in the car on the radio, she had to pull over and cry.
There’s a version of this story where time of time marked by gun violence, but this story is hard enough to write.
Much has been written on school shootings and politics, like the limits of gun legislation and the power of lobbies. Much has been said about school shootings and public health, like the absence of mental health resources and better detection of red flags. But you want more on school shootings and educations, what this all means for schools. How are students, their families, and their teachers making sense of it all? How are we all waking up and walking into school everyday? How are we keeping each other safe? How can we?
Schools have always been sites of violence. You knew this and you became a teacher anyways. When you first started working with kids, you suddenly saw how danger was all around you. When crossing the street, when eating a snack, when running on the playground, you never realised how much of teaching revolves around trying to keep kids safe. Maybe that’s one way to think about it. If one of the purposes of schools is to keep kids safe, then the violence that occurs within them is an indictment of a system that has fallen short of its responsibility.
“For every loved child, a child broken, bagged/sunk in a lake,” writes Maggie Smith, and though most of us are lucky to evade the latter, none of us come out of schools completely unscathed. Schools are not immune to the violences prevalent in the world that we live in, and yet we have a duty to make them safe spaces we students can grow, and learn, and thrive. But how do we make schools safe?
Schools have always been sanctuaries of safety. Children given refuge away from the abuse and hurt of their homes. Children provided with meals and shelter they may otherwise not receive. Children looked for and cared for and affirmed. Schools provide safety nets, and they are safety nets, holding students within their walls and providing them with the knowledge and skills they need to survive in the world today and in the future too.
School shootings show us the limits to safety and that in a world as broken and as complicated as ours, we can’t always keep our kids safe. But maybe there’s new commitments we can make out of new concepts of safety. Maybe safe schools come from just trying to keep students happy, healthy, and loved.
We make schools safe by centring joy in what we teach and how it is taught, from culturally-responsive curriculums and materials, to play-based learning and collaborative approaches. We make schools safe by helping kids live longer, through providing wrap-around services to shelter and food outside of school, and making mental health resources available from every age to every stakeholder. We make schools safe by loving kids, and telling them how much they are loved, and showing them how much they are loved, because we might be the only place they feel that, and even if not, you can never have too much.
We make schools safe by transforming our notions of what safety and school might look like by going from preventing harm to creating healing.
One afternoon, you decide that instead of a math lesson, you’re going to take your kids outside for an early afternoon snack. You walk them out and have them sit in the garden before handing them all some pears. You sit on the ground with them and they crawl towards you until you have kindergarteners sitting on your lap and coming out of your armpit. As they squeal and you laugh, you realise that this is pure joy, and you see that joy reflected on your kids’ faces too.
There’s danger all around and there’s happiness too. There’s pockets of time that feel like infinity and carry you through the fear. You became a teacher for moments like these that happen everyday, where in the midst of everything, your kids do a funny dance, or they give each other hugs, or you come back from the bathroom and they tell you how much they missed you. Time is passing and you’re safe. You’ve alive and you’re safe. Your kids are loved and they’re safe.