LOCKDOWN. Pack up your books, grab a friend, and chat it up in the corner of the room. What a fun way to spend class!
“This is not a drill.”
Not so fun anymore.
According to the new ALICE procedures, you are confronted with several choices. Stay in the corner, barricade the doors, run out of the school, or catapult through the window.
It’s up to you. How does it feel to have to potentially make this sort of decision?
With all of this new security in place, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that gun violence is a gargantuan problem that is not being taken seriously enough. We’re only treating a symptom, not the actual problem. School has become a place where students may face execution.
Rewind to last year. Even though the previous lockdown procedure called for us to stay put in the corner of the class, if Mr. Mead declared that there was a gun wielding maniac roaming the school and I was stuck in math class, I would have leaped out the H300 windows without a moment of hesitation. To me, a few broken bones is preferable to potentially getting a bullet in the face.
The new procedure permits students to make more conscious decisions about how to save themselves if this situation arises, but none of them are choices any of us should have to make.
The 2010 US Census estimates that between 47 and 53 million households own one or more guns. How unsettling is it that schools are being trained in huddling for safety from students who have convenient access to guns, usually in their own homes? School should not be a place where students have to evaluate their classrooms for the best emergency exit.
This all seems reminiscent of “Duck and Cover” drills of the 1950’s. However, this isn’t political warfare. This is the violent attitude that has been deeply ingrained in the brains of our youth. Defending ourselves is an important step towards ensuring students’ safety, but nothing is going to change until we take the weapons out of students’ hands.