An earlier generation hid under desks to avoid falling nuclear bombs; now the threat is more immediate
Peter Sipe, a teacher at Boston Collegiate Charter School in Dorchester, writes about the intruder-alert drills his school now does:
I instructed everyone to move desks toward the wall and tip them to serve as shields. I'd been dreading this drill, expecting chaos or at least alarm. However, the kids performed not only excellently, but ... cheerfully, which took me aback. Then I realized they were reacting with the same joy I'd felt whenever I heard the fire bell. It's that wonderful reminder that boredom's dominion isn't unchallenged in school -- teachers will call in sick, snow can fall on Sunday night and the law mandates fire drills.
My students and I are fortunate to be in a school whose primary concern is our safety. And we're fortunate -- if that is the word -- to know how to run lockdown drills. But my 13th year is indeed unlucky. It's the first I've ever had to teach children how not to get shot. It's the first I've told kids to be still because movement and noise attract attention and the first I've checked to make sure they've concealed themselves as best they could. And as I went from desk to desk, I saw what I don't always remember to see 20 minutes into second period: beautiful children full of life and promise.
Comments
My daughters school had
My daughters school had "shooting" drills about 5 years ago, I thought all schools have been doing this. What a sad state of affairs.
this post
This beautiful post made me cry.
I'm on the verge of tears
I'm on the verge of tears myself. I had hoped we'd never see the day where we needed to teach small children to shield themselves from bullets with their desks. What a sickening commentary on the world we live in.
We don't need to teach small
We don't need to teach small children to shield themselves from bullets. Despite all the news coverage, school shootings are extremely uncommon.
Lots of things are uncommon.
Lots of things are uncommon. Plane crashes are pretty uncommon, but they still go over the procedure every time you board a plane.
And I don't know about you, but school shootings still are not nearly uncommon enough for my tastes. Especially when the victims are 6 year olds.
This post reminded me of a
This post reminded me of a conversation I had with my husband last week regarding his school, where he teaches kindergarten. We were discussing safety drills and lockdown drills, and I made an offhand remark that I assumed part of that drill would be shutting his classroom door and locking it.
He looked at me like I had two heads. I then realized that his classroom door actually didn't have a lock. After a brief conversation, I learned that not only did his room not have a lock, there were no classroom locks in his entire building. In fact, he has taught in three BPS school buildings and not one of them had classroom door locks. Apparently one of the schools he attended in NH had them either.
Now I went to school in Central Connecticut and I distinctly remember all of our classroom doors - elementary, middle, and high school locking. When class began, the teacher would close the door behind him/her and it would be locked. When we went to lunch, he or she would close the door behind us and it would be locked. At the end of the day the teacher would leave their classroom locked. (Mind you these were the type of locks that could be opened from inside the classroom, but not from outside the classroom. And teachers were all issued keys to their own classrooms just as offices issue ID badges)
Was my school system in Connecticut the exception? Did anybody else attend school in buildings where the classrooms were locked? And is this an obvious safety option that's being missed? Is there some sort of law that forbades the locking of classrooms?
Another public safety issue?
Maybe the last thing you want if a fire breaks out is a bunch of panicked kids on the wrong side of a locked door.
I am trying to devise a
I am trying to devise a scenario where that might happen, but I'm having a hard time coming up with one. Under the scenario I was talking about above, the doors would always open from inside a classroom, so if the fire alarm went off, the students and teacher would simply open the door and exit the building as per their typical fire drill procedure.
Schools also should have a series of fire doors in the hallways that close when the alarm is tripped and funnel people toward the exits.
I guess the biggest realization I had was that schools were practicing "lock down" procedures, without the actual ability to lock anything.
In case you've never noticed
most doorknobs can be turned from the inside, even if they're locked on the outside. Problem solved.
Doh!
This is another example of why you wouldn't want me designing your home security system ...
My schools in NY
had locks on the doors, too. The teachers would lock the door whenever the room was unattended with no teachers and students inside. It was to keep stuff from being stolen from the classroom, mostly the teacher's wallet/purse, but sometimes AV and computer equipment.
In high school, we did anti-terror lockdown drills, and locking the classroom door was part of the drill.
The schools I attended in
The schools I attended in Virginia all had locks on the classroom doors. We also had "Resource Officers" (i.e. police officers) assigned full time to the high schools as early as the mid-90s and this was a very bucolic suburban/rural county at the time.
Duck without cover?
I am not surprised. Duck and cover was the norm in the 50s and 60s when The Bomb was the threat. Now what is feared bullets instead of nuclear bombs.
An irony is this is not a new problem. I remember urban schools installing metal detectors in the 70s. Barricading in the classroom is new but the problem is not.
There are so many issues that this represents. The desire to own devices designed to kill. The romanticization of guns. The bizarre and I think perverted association of guns to some conception of freedom. The lack of understanding of the Constitution and its history that led to the wrong interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. I also wonder if perhaps at an unspoken level, like the elephant in the living room, violence is a demigod in the American secular religion.
All of these national characteristics combine to create an illusion that the possession and use of firearms is viewed as a sacred right. The result is that any attempt to regulate (which even in the Court's wrong interpretation was left as a legitimate action) is assumed to be a violation of freedom.
The phrased used to create fear is "When guns are outlawed only outlaws have guns." A better phrase is "Is there a bullet with your name?" Guns are delivery systems for bullets. The more guns and bullets the more opportunities of a bullets meeting their marks. Since bullets don't discriminate those marks are adults and children, innocent bystanders and gangbangers. Bullets don't care who is the target. Bullets exist solely to main and kill. So is there a bullet with your name on it?
There was no hiding under
There was no hiding under desks in the BPS in 1960 when I started school. We were marched down into the basement of the school during air raid drills. No doubt it went on in other systems, but not in Boston.
And no one was shooting up schools either.
No basements...
... in Tulsa schools. Despite the comparative frequency of tornadoes in Oklahoma (much more likely a disaster than an A-bomb attack), basements were very rare.
When I finally thought about
When I finally thought about it, I never understood what the point was of sending us to the basement of a large brick building. We would have been safer running down the street and jumping into Jamaica Pond.
Soft Lockdown
My daughter (2nd grade) had a friend over last week. At one point I heard one of them say:" We're in hard lockdown!". When I checked later they had piled all the stuffed animals in a corner away from the door and hidden them under a blanket.
I think they are fine, but my 1st grader is still having a hard time.