It was April 20, 1999. I was working at a local middle school as an Interventionist, basically a hall monitor/lunch room chaperone/student outreach staff member. It was a pretty mundane day at work, but when I got home and turned on the television I learned that in Columbine, Colorado two boys had spent weeks plotting and planning a massacre at their school, Columbine High.
Fifteen people died that day, 12 students, 1 teacher, and the two perpetrators. Twenty-four were injured. The world watched as children fled the building, hands on their heads, streaming past armed police. The news was full of footage of parents waiting anxiously to find out if their child was safe. There had been school shootings before this one, but at the time this was the deadliest, and the planning and preparation was terrifying.
The next day I screwed up my courage and headed to school for work. To say that the mood was tense and muted would be an understatement. Mid-morning the fire alarm was pulled by a student and we nervously evacuated the building. It was a poorly timed prank, we got the all clear and went back into the building.
I finished the school year at the middle school having lived through a bomb threat between April and the end of the school year. As I walked out of the building the last time, I had a job offer in my hand to teach at a high school in the Fall.
I spent a week in August setting up my classroom and thinking about Columbine. I assessed our fire drill route, where my class was assigned to stand, what my classroom looked like, and how would I keep kids safe if a shooter came to our school. In the end, I came up with a plan that would leave my classroom locked, looking like we had evacuated out the windows, with all of my students hidden from the view of the classroom doors.
School started and in late September, I decided the day had come to talk to my students about my plan and to practice it to see if it would work the way I thought it would. Each class that day walked in and we talked about safety, Columbine, and then I explained my plan, assigned students to open the windows, turn off the lights, overturn desks near the window, and showed the students where and how we would hide by pressing up against the wall of the classroom between the two doors. I always taught withe the classroom doors shut and locked during class.
Each class practiced, discussed, and by the end of the day I was pleased that I felt like I had a viable plan, just in case. As I was cleaning up and getting ready to leave, the assistant principal for my area of the school knocked on my door. I let him in and he said that he was concerned to hear about my activity that day. He asked if I knew what he was talking about. Since the shooter drill was the primary activity in each class I replied that I guessed that was the cause of concern. It was. he said that he felt it was too alarming to the students and other teachers and I should cease this activity. If I did it again, I would likely be fired. I promised not to drill again, but by then I was sure that if the worst should happen, my kids would know what to do.
That was 21 years ago. Now we have live action shooter drills in kindergartens. Children learn how to hide silently in dark closets, shelter in place, evacuate with hands on their heads. Teachers are given emergency kits with evacuation routes, class rosters, and Sharpie markers to write names on students injured or dead. Sometimes the children are not warned it is a drill and they have to hide while listening to actors roaming the halls "hunting" them.
I think back to my innocent little plan, which I repeated in the next school I worked in. I was going to make sure I had a plan to do my utmost to keep my students safe. I had parents complain, I had administrators caution me, but I persisted. I wonder how many people remember the reaction I got to those drills and wish it were that simple now.
