Recently, my son did an active-shooter drill at his school. I asked him how it went. He mentioned how it was fine, but a few students couldn’t be quiet.
I nodded, remembering my days as a middle school teacher when I’d have to insist that children be quiet when, developmentally, they’d want to shake the room. An active-shooter drill means that teachers have to lock their doors, cover their door windows, command students to hide in a corner or a less obvious spot in the classroom, and ask for perfect silence. From a professional standpoint, I understand these drills (fire drills, lockdown drills, active shooter drills, etc.) help us prepare for emergencies and serve to instill a sense of routine for everyone in our schools. Yet, the fact that we need certain types of drills in our society feels gruesome given the type of work we’re attempting in schools. Too much of the rhetoric out there suggests that students should both be protected from sensitive conversations and be prepared for what happens when we don’t have those conversations.
Two questions we don’t ask often enough when it comes to our schools: “What will we do about this in the long term?” and “How did we get here?”
Too many people say things like “Well, I want my child to feel safe in a classroom,” appealing to the lowest common denominator. Yes, of course, most caregivers want safety. But where the argument usually falls apart is what people determine as safety. The word “safety” is relative to multiple factors, usually involving identity and social context. Where most parents agree on some measures of safety (“Can my child turn to someone when they’re getting bullied?” or “Do they have a designated person they can trust in the building when I’m not there?”), things get more precarious as we ask for finer details. Where one set of parents want to prevent their children from hearing about society’s problems, another set of parents knows their children will face those problems and wish to gather the tools to survive and perhaps thrive in this life.
I get that values ultimately determine what we want from schools, but I don’t get how we continue to put forth one dominant set of values that continually harm us all, particularly our schools.
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