I was in junior high when I heard about Columbine. A friend’s mom was driving us home from school. *Nsync was playing on the radio when the DJs cut in with a news headline. We switched to NPR and exclaimed in shock as the details about duffel bags and evacuation and anguish came out. I could visualize it happening to me, but I was comforted by the thought that it was highly unlikely. That was the same age I started watching horror movies. Shooters inside a high school didn’t feel appreciably more tangible to me than the killer in the Scream mask.
In my very first year of teaching, I was checking the time on my phone at recess when I saw a pop-up headline. Students and staff members dead at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. I remember my first reaction being surprise at how calm I felt. As the afternoon wore on, adrenaline surged in my body. I held this huge secret in the back of my mind while trying to teach Writer’s Workshop with a straight face. It wasn’t until my third-graders left for the day that I learned details and started processing. Sandy Hook was only a few hours away from my Boston-area school. The students had been huddled in their classroom, just as we had practiced our lockdown drill cowering in the cubbies. What would I do if it were my classroom? What if it had been my beloved students? Those first-graders will never go to second grade. Those little children will never grow up. What if a gunman had come into our office? Which staff members would have died trying to stop him?
The next day, my eight- and nine-year-old students all knew. I had to look them in the eyes in our Morning Meeting, a time for community-building and tone-setting. I told them they were safe. Was it true? It was what I had to tell them. Did I believe it? Did they?
Brave Sandy Hook parents shared their pain on a nationwide scale, and the president gave speeches, and we had safety trainings at school. I nurtured a hope that things would change.
Nothing has changed.
They bulldozed Sandy Hook Elementary. You can’t keep teaching multiplication in the same place your colleagues were murdered. You can’t share Play-Doh at the same table where a dead kid once sat. But don’t we all still inhabit those spaces? Each time we turn the key in our own classroom doors, we are accompanied by the echoes of our massacred counterparts. When our students board their school buses, they live out parallel moments of kin-kids who no longer can. Daily, we enter the same reality as those teachers and students who died. Public education in America — heck, childhood in America — has not been made safer. And that’s simply unacceptable. It’s past time to bulldoze our “right” to own guns.
Please consider donating to Everytown and calling your elected officials to demand change.