When the mass school shooting in Georgia happened last week, it was the first time I didn’t cry. In fact, I didn’t even hear about it until hours later, and when I saw the news alert on my phone at the end of the school day and mentioned it to a few colleagues, after an initial “Oh my God” and “Terrible,” we all went back to work on our computers.
The news covered it, but there was no clarion call from students demanding legislative action, no signs of a larger movement as there had been following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida in 2018. In fact, even the newscast that evening went back to the pending presidential debate prep coverage.
None of this is to say that the shooting isn’t horrific, terrifying, and unacceptable. But all of this is to say that we have become so used to this news that we have become collectively immune to its logical psychological reactions and effects. It’s like chicken pox or polio. You hear about it, you know it’s largely preventable, it seems to happen to “other people,” and most of us aren’t directly affected.
But this is not news to you. I am not the first one to argue that the frequency of school shootings in America has left us where we no longer react in the same way we once did and the shock value is lost. However, as a high school administrator, I feel something else this time. Something that rather than filling me with terror and sadness and shame has filled me with rage.
Given my two-plus decades as an educator, I am well aware that schools are often tasked with solving problems they did not create. We provide hungry students with meals so they can learn; we provide free dental clinics, vaccine clinics, mental health counselors, school supplies, bags of food for the weekend, workshops on parenting, free babysitting—the list goes on. And now, now, we are tasked with preventing students and random individuals from taking their guns that this country allows them to purchase, have, and carry and shooting up a school.
We are tasked with being sure all outside doors are locked. We are tasked with developing, communicating, practicing, and carrying out emergency plans in the event of an active shooter. We are tasked with conducting training for staff and students on how to run, hide, and fight an intruder; where to meet when they run out of the school with their hands on their head; how to stop a bleed; and how to determine who to leave behind in the event that not everyone can get out quickly and safely.
I do not say this to dispute that keeping students safe is our utmost and most grave responsibility. Of course. However, I will remind you that we, in education, are not law enforcement officers. We are not the SWAT team, we are not Homeland Security, and we are not trained in any of these things when we go to school to learn to be teachers or counselors or principals. But as I sit here reading the news with my coffee on this September Sunday, I am reminded again that schools are expected to solve problems they did not create.
The article I was reading was about the latest school shooting and had more details about the family members of the 14-year-old boy who killed two of his fellow students and two teachers. The quote that made me sit down and write before I finished my first cup of coffee was from a parent of another student in the school who was angry with school officials for not taking more aggressive action sooner. “You were looking for the kid … and you didn’t lock up the school when you found out he wasn’t in the class?” the parent is quoted as saying. “If they had locked the school down, a lot of people might still freaking be here.”
The easiest thing in the world is to Monday-morning quarterback this or any situation. It is easy to place blame and think your hindsight “should have” been other people’s foresight.
As a high school assistant principal, I do not want blood on my hands. I got into this profession to teach students and to support teachers in preparing students to be successful, productive, thoughtful citizens in this democratic society. And I fully understand the awesome responsibility that I have. And I can tell you that ad hoc problem-solving, in-the-moment decisionmaking, triage, and unpredictability come with our professional territory.
As an assistant principal, I am a teacher, a mom, a problem-solver, a decisionmaker, a disciplinarian, a mental health provider, a custodian … and sometimes all at once. But one thing I am not is a psychic. I can’t know where the problem is going to be. I can’t anticipate—as administrators at Apalachee High School in Georgia did not—that a student is going to bring a gun to school, ask to go to the restroom, and return to algebra class to murder his classmates. I can’t know every single student in the school and which backpack is whose in the event that someone calls to say, as apparently did the Georgia shooter’s mother, that there is an “emergency” with their own child, who they chose to send to school anyway. And the fact that some would expect school administrators to immediately locate the troubled child and prevent his actions is absolutely ludicrous.
If we in this country cannot send our children to school with a fairly high level of assurance that they’re going to come home alive, we have a much larger problem than school administrators not knowing whose backpack is whose or making split-second decisions on when to lock the school down. And I can say from my experience that the more we blame schools, teachers, and administrators for problems they did not create, the fewer caring, kind, qualified people will enter and stay in this field.
We educators want to keep kids safe. We want to support their physical and mental health so they can learn, and we want schools to be places of innovation and democratic ideals. But we cannot do that alone. We need the village of community, parents, and government to join us. We need a society that supports all the needs of our students. Then we can do what we do best, which is educate our youth.
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