School Safety:
The Emotional Repercussions of Perpetual Threats at School
A journal post
So, a different sort of post is once again coming at you, my readers, this one about school safety. And I know that most people come here to read a certain type of thing. I have my romance review readers, my crochet and knitting fiber friends, and gaming people who peruse my journal on any given day. So when I post about something off-topic, it’s hard to find a place to stick posts like these. But this is still my personal blog so I will from time to time post about something that’s just on my mind.
School Safety and School Threats
Readers who have been with me a while know that I am a teacher in my day job and also that I live in Georgia, pretty close to Winder-Barrow and Apalachee High School. Since the school shooting there on the 4th of September everyone in my district has been on edge.
Schools should be a safe place. But the reality, one that students know, is that schools are not always safe. Because of the threats, many students at my school stayed home on Friday, be it out of fear or just to be safe. Completely valid reasons, to me. In other counties, I’m sure it was the same.
What’s sick about the aftermath of what happened in Winder-Barrow is that other threats poured in all over the place. Especially on Thursday and Friday of that week, threats were peppering social media. News sites reported students being arrested and charged with making threats all over the Southeast. The high school in Gwinnett County I attended was named. Another threat specifically mentioned the middle school where I teach. In Franklin County, an hour north of us even closed the high school on Friday the 6th because of threats and photos circulating around. Scary, too close to home, shit. Pardon my language.
School Safety Drills
Everyone knows that having drills prepares people for actual emergencies. The goal is to keep school safety at the forefront of everyone’s minds. We have regular, monthly fire drills and severe weather drills throughout the school year. The era of active shooters though, has necessitated the introduction of lockdown drills that happen to prepare students and teachers for the horrible possibility of something happening at their school.
When a lockdown drill happens at a school, the community and stakeholders are told in advance so that everyone, and I mean everyone, knows that it is a DRILL and not a real emergency. This is to assuage students, parents, and community members completely viable panic when we simulate the events that we’ve seen play out again and again and again in schools across the country.
Just going through the motions, it’s impossible to stop yourself from imagining how it would feel to be in that school if something were actually happening. It’s horrible. Thoughts going full steam, heart pounding, adrenaline pumping, it’s a horrible event to even conceptually prepare for.
So, Friday the 13th
Getting to the point here. Yesterday was Friday the 13th and for some people that’s a day of ill omen. Inauspicious. Bad luck. It was a normal, if not a bit squirrely day at school. Middle school students are at the best of times chaotic little beings barely self-aware enough to focus for a lesson. At the worst of times, well, chaotic is their starting point.
It was 7th period. After a chaotic class of an end-of-unit test, begging my class to finish the work sessions I will be grading in the next few days, and to do SOMETHING academic in the last few minutes of class to further their development into articulate humans at some point in their future, it finally it was time for dismissal. Friday antsy is a different type of antsiness.
Then, right at dismissal the red strobe light goes off, and a voice comes over the speakers that we are going into lockdown. The voice instructs us to turn off the lights, lock the door (already locked) and get into hiding. Most chilling, the statements finishes with the words ‘prepare to defend’. Yikes.
We never, ever go into hard lockdown without a warning. Unless it’s like, the real deal. Like I said, when we have a lockdown drill it is always with lots of advance warning to us, students and parents so everyone knows it is a drill.
No Warning This Time
But there was none of that. So, I motion my class to the corner of the classroom where there is a little alcove. We scuttle over, turn off the lights, and get silent. Most of us get silent. Some kids’ natural reaction is to giggle and laugh, but there was an honest undercurrent of fear, nervousness, and anxiety fueling those little laughs. I might have muttered a curse word at them to be freaking quiet because I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
When I say the school got silent I mean woah it was silent. A few students had been in the bathroom and the bang of the stall doors was loud enough to make me jump. My heart was
So we huddle in the corner and stay as silent as 7th graders can be. And then we wait. And wait. It might have just been a few minutes but it felt like an actual eternity. I was checking my phone for texts, and emails. Just checking for anything. Kids were understandably texting their parents. I was afraid that something was happening in the front office because there wasn’t any announcement over the intercom.
School Safety Means… An Accidental Lockdown
The thing is, it was an accident. You know that because there was not another news story about another shooting happening at another school. And that’s the best outcome, of course. But even though it was only an accidental lockdown, it was so fucking traumatic for everyone.
Finally, when someone came on the intercom, their response was so nonchalant and blasé. “Oopsie everything good, let’s dismiss.” Another announcement was made later by our mighty principal (who I love!) to further explain what happened. Something also went out to parents. But I know teachers were also reeling.
I deeply appreciate my assistant principal sending a feedback request to teachers so we could unpack some of our feelings following the events. She’s new this year but I love her as AP. On a side note, good admin is so very important for schools, and that includes issues of school safety.
How Could an Accidental Lockdown Happen?
The thing is, the system worked like it was supposed to. We have the same Centigix badges that Apalachee High School has. In fact, I heard that Barrow County saw that Clarke was using them so that’s one of the reasons they got a contract with the company.
So every employee in the school has a badge with an emergency button on it. Which means every employee is capable of triggering that hard lockdown. School safety is in everyone’s hands. They’re not super easy to push, and to trigger a lockdown the button has to be pushed a lot of times for a hard lockdown to be triggered. But people, in the heat of the moment, are not infallible.
If something happens in our classroom, we push the button. Three times gets admin running. If the button gets pushed a certain number of times though, the system automatically trips over to some auto process where it calls the police and switches the hard lockdown alarm.
Honestly, when we first got the badges a few years ago, I was concerned it was going to be me who accidentally triggered the lockdown. But the buttons are not super easy to push, you have to intend to push them. And I am happy to have the badges. They’ve been proven effective. But I guess people are freaking out in the moment and it can be easy to push the button too many times.
Traumatizing
It was really too much for that to have happened at the end of the school day on Friday afternoon. Like my adrenaline was pumping. It honestly took me a few hours before my heartbeat and breathing felt normal again. School safety should be a baseline condition. It’s tragic it’s not. There’s no way to describe what it feels like to consider that whatever is happening might be an actual emergent event, and I hope to everything in the universe that I never have to experience that happening in a school I work in for real.
Normal Posts
I have a few normal posts in the pipeline. I’ve finished most of the ARCs I was reading this week and have reviews drafted for them. I’ll be posting them through this coming week, so look forward to that, my MM Romance readers.
