Teacher perspective- school shootings

I validate you.

I can virtually guarantee you that the teacher who signed up to carry is the one who definitely shouldn’t be. No teacher in their right mind would carry at school.

I have to say that of all the reasons I’m glad to be done with school teaching, this is high on the list. Especially with the new state-appointed superintendent who requires teachers to keep their doors propped open at all times. People feel very vulnerable.

Despite what Republicans claim, being the most heavily armed state in the country has not made Texas safer. Not one bit.

I am in Canada ... school shootings are rare ... we have strict gun control but that will not stop someone who is intent ...

We practice "lock downs" in our schools here in Calgary ... some classrooms are better protected than others when it comes to windows etc.

I have been in a situation where there was an intruder but I didn't feel unsafe because there were police everywhere in the school ... 

We just don't have a gun culture here ... I don't know if that makes us feel safe or stupid!  It only takes one crazy person ...

My state, NH, allows guns in polling places. Crazy, but it's NH, live free or die. Schools are used as polling places and as a result, most are closed or professional development days on Election Day. When we had professional development on Election Day in 2022, we did active threat drills. The irony that we were there without kids, practicing active threat drills because guns are allowed in polling places was not lost on me.
It breaks my heart that we're expected to lock our doors and if a kindergartner or first grade student is locked out, we are not supposed to open the door for them. I hate that this is what we're expected to do.

As a teacher is there anything you are able to do to "identify" these students to anyone? At least to get them on some sort of internal watch list? Do you treat them differently, meaning like not to piss them off?  

I'm probably not articulating this very well in writing.  Sorry.

We practice lockdown at the beginning of the year. I know my first goal if there were a shooter would be to get the kids out of the building.

We had a school shooting in our district several years ago. It wasn't in our building, but we were in lockdown for almost 2 hours. One person was killed at a high school and another shot. The shooter killed himself. Son of a police officer. It was terrifying not knowing what was going on.

I have had students that I absolutely think would be capable of shooting up a school. Unless you have some threat, there is nothing you can do. We can't put them on a watch list.

I taught for 42 years, retired now for four. I have seen such major changes over those years.

When I first started, it was routine for teachers to have the fire doors in their classrooms propped open for better air flow and temperature control. Even the ones that opened onto the alley along the side of the school. People could freely walk into the offices. Staff didn’t wear ID badges or even have phones in their rooms; we were lucky to have working intercoms. And it was long before everyone carried cell phones.

When Columbine happened it was horrible and made people think about safety and security but I don’t think it was taken as seriously as it might have been.

Sandy Hook changed things. We saw the faces of tiny kids who were shot and the six adults who were killed in an elementary setting. I had to answer a young girl who looked around the room we were in and asked what I’d do to save them if there was a shooter. I had an answer for her that seemed to satisfy the kids that day.

But, what I didn’t say and never really talked about to the students, but thought about a great deal, was that it might be pure luck, based on location.

For pretty much all of my career I was in rooms that were very near entrance/exit doors. For the first 22 years I was in one room, near the playground doors, in the first room you’d encounter that actually had students in it. I moved many times over the next 20 years and only once was in a room that was halfway down a hallway and not near a door.

When that student asked me my plan to save them, we were in a room very close to the front main entrance. If a shooter came in there and was intent on random mass killing, whether we had time to hide or escape would depend totally on whether there were students in the music room which was just a couple feet inside the entrance. The wood-framed door with chicken wire plexiglass panels was built to slow down someone trying to break in to a locked room, not stop a bullet.

The last year I taught I was full time in our newish junior high building. I was in a small room about as far from the front entrance as you could get. The building has LOTS of glass walls and windows. IF someone came in the front or any of the other doors in the building, and we were alerted, I would have had the best chance of most any teacher of getting my small group of kids out the back entrance that was very near my room. When we had a drill I told the kids if I told them to GO, they should run toward a brushy wooded area and get away - and not wait for me because I wouldn’t be able to run with them. BUT, i didn’t tell them if someone chose to shoot out the glass and come in that entrance/exit, there would be no time to do anything, as we would have been the first people they saw.

It’s sobering to realize you can do all the drills but if and how you survive should it happen could be pure chance.

I agree. Yes, we know them, and no, we can't do anything about it. You can't do anything until they do something. No, we don't treat them differently. You can't single a kid out because they seem angry, antisocial or weird. That wouldn't be right.

I've taught for 30 years and every single year there have been 2-3 kids in the school that I thought were capable of doing it. My building has 700 students in it- statistically there are always going to be a few of those kids.

Here’s a teacher’s perspective.

There was another one in Joppatown, Maryland today.

As a substitute teacher this is the first thing I think of when I go into a classroom. Of course it's different for every room so even though I only sub in one school I'm constantly revising my emergency plans for each different room. Then there's the 2nd grade plan which is to take the kids out the windows onto the roof, then either hide there out of sight of a shooter who might come in the classroom door, or go down over the edge (it's very low-hanging and would be easy to do if an adult when first) and into the backyards of the houses that border the school playground. Or the 3rd grade that's in trailers out back, where all four classrooms have windows on two sides and the door on a third side (this is a block of four trailers put together to make one "building"), so the plan is to get all the kids into the bathrooms. 

I remember after the Uvalde shooting I was subbing the very next day in the 2nd grade. I was standing in the middle of the classroom thinking about where to hide kids. One of the other 2nd grade teachers arrived, saw me, and came in to see if I was looking for something. I said "no I'm just thinking..." and she said "Thinking about where to hide kids?" yep. And that's when I learned about the new-to-me 2nd grade plan to go out the windows if we had to. 

We had a lockdown drill this past week and the class I was in actually had one student caught outside of the room when the drill was announced. I was subbing for a SPED resource teacher so I was push-in, thankfully. I knew the drill was coming but I wasn't really paying attention beforehand since I wasn't the primary teacher in the room. When I am the main teacher I won't let anyone leave the room by at least 15 minutes before the drill time. Maybe 20 even because I'm a worrier. Well this teacher let a kid go out right before the drill. Not sure what she was thinking, or probably she just wasn't thinking. We had to lock the door immediately and that kid was still out there (4th grade). Because it was just a drill there were staff members out in the halls (the ones who were going to go around and check that all the doors were locked) so someone found him immediately because he came out of the bathroom. But wow. And of course in a real shooter situation this could happen because kids come and go to the bathroom all the time. Or they go to the library to get a book during their class's free reading time. Or they get pulled out by the reading specialist and then head back to their classroom by themselves. etc. 

I'm in South Texas, and our district finally started making election day a holiday a few years ago. So many of our schools are used as polling places. It just wasn't safe--particularly at the elementary schools with elderly people who didn't know the traffic patterns and decided they HAD to go vote as school was getting out. EVERY YEAR I saw a kid almost get hit in our parking lot. EVERY. YEAR.

My large urban district in TX just made election day a holiday a couple of years ago, and then our new state-appointed superintendent came in and said we couldn't possibly lose that day of instruction. So we're back to having hundreds of unvetted, unknown people traipsing into our elementary schools every election day. And of course the superintendent also requires everyone to keep their doors propped open at all times.

Very safe.