Not a Drill

This is what passes for normal in this country. Every day, our children enter their schools and assume a risk we cannot shield them from.

At my 13-year-old’s school, phones are supposed to stay in backpacks or lockers unless there’s an emergency. So I’m surprised and a little alarmed to see several texts from her at 11:40 in the morning, even before I see why she sent them.

the police are here
there are rumors that there’s a shooting threat
we’re in shelter lockdown

I’ve had nightmares that begin with texts like this. Part of being a parent of school-age children in America. It’s all too easy to believe her messages, yet even after I read them two, three times, I can’t accept what they could mean. My fingers start typing a response before my brain can catch up.

we love you. it’s going to be okay.

I don’t know if it’s going to be okay. I do know the rumor of a threat isn’t the same thing as a credible threat. But for us at this moment it might as well be—we have no idea what’s happening; we aren’t sure whether the threat is real or a hoax; we cannot know whether anyone is in danger. Right now, all we know is that this isn’t a drill.

stay safe and listen to your teacher.

I try to recall her schedule—is she in science or Spanish class? Is she with a teacher she trusts? Has she seen anything, heard anything, or is she just waiting for something to happen in the silence of her locked classroom? I picture her hunkered down with frightened classmates, all of them still coping with the many annoyances and anxieties of attending school during a pandemic, now texting their worried parents with phones they are usually forbidden to use on campus. For years, they have been told what to do in this exact scenario. I’ve seen my child remain calm and steady through many stressful situations, especially over the last two years—but a possible shooting threat and lockdown at her middle school? How can she feel anything but terrified?

text us any updates if you want—also okay if you can’t.
we’re right here.

I’m desperate for more information, but I don’t want to bombard her with questions she has no answers to, or say anything that could frighten her more. I try to think of something else to type, something that could reassure her—I’m her mother, I should be able to do that much. But the truth is that there’s nothing I can say, nothing at all, to make any of this better. It shouldn’t be happening. She shouldn’t have to be afraid for herself, for her friends and teachers, in their school.

When I call the school and get no answer, I think about driving over there, finding her, and bringing her home. I could be there in seven minutes. I should be with her. But as I reach for my keys, I remember that no one will let me in during a lockdown. My presence could make a tense situation worse for those charged with keeping my child and others safe. Though it feels terribly wrong, I am already doing the only thing I can: watching my phone, waiting for her to text and tell me that she’s okay.

*

I was in high school when Thurston and Columbine happened, which means I was in high school before it occurred to me that I could be shot in my school. This knowledge is something that American schoolkids of all ages live with now. My 13-year-old has been participating in shooter drills since she was 3 years old—though when she was younger, her teachers couched them in vague, less frightening terms. I remember the day she came home from preschool and told me, “We practiced what to do in case someone is in the school who shouldn’t be.” She described her teacher locking the doors, turning off the lights, and herding all the students into a small bathroom, where they were told to sit still and stay “very, very quiet.” “It was hard. We weren’t very quiet,” she admitted.

For weeks after the Sandy Hook shooting, I dreaded dropping her off at school. One morning, as I watched her jump down from the car seat, carrying a backpack that was about half her size, it occurred to me that I was putting my faith not in administrators or in drills, but in cold hard statistics—simply going by the numbers, it was highly unlikely that my child would ever see bullets flying in her school.

This is still true, even if it is also the most ghoulish form of reassurance I know.

According to Education Week’s school-shooting tracker, there have been 32 school shootings in 2021, 24 of them since August 1. A news search brings up new rumors and threats each week, many serious enough to trigger lockdowns, investigations, school closures—not to mention fear and trauma that is much harder to quantify. Some stories suggest that there has been an uptick in threats since the November 30 shooting that killed four students in Oxford, Michigan. Last Friday, districts across the nation were on alert—some even chose to close for the day—due to alleged shooting and bomb threats circulating on social media. Meanwhile, a bill that would expand background checks for gun sales passed in the House in March, but was blocked by Republicans in the Senate two days after the Oxford High School shooting. Representative Elissa Slotkin has said that she wants to introduce federal legislation requiring gun owners to secure and store weapons so that children cannot access them, but that, too, would likely face strong opposition.

In the absence of the moral and political will necessary to change how deadly weapons are acquired, sold, and regulated, our children and their educators get “thoughts and prayers”; code-red procedures; reminders to stay calm, follow the rules, and know their exits. From early childhood, we expect kids to learn how to hide and/or defend themselves from armed attackers who might lay siege to their schools. We teach them to be quiet, to wait in the dark, to barricade entrances and cram into closets and duck behind desks. While they were in lockdown last week, my 13-year-old and some of her peers looked out of their classroom windows to confirm that they were indeed too high to leap from. This is what they have been trained to do—what we have trained them to do, even as we hope they will never need the lessons internalized after years of active-shooter drills. This is the reality we live with.

*

I’ve given up calling the school and am frantically searching online for news, trying not to panic, when she texts again.

it’s over
the police finished their investigation

She’s headed to her next class. Relief floods in, absorbing some but not all of my fear. My feelings of helplessness, rage, and sorrow are unabated.

I’m sorry this happened, I write back, because it feels important that someone apologize to her. We love you.

For the rest of the day I’m useless, unable to focus on anything. She’s fine, I keep reminding myself. She’s safe, nothing happened, it wasn’t a “credible threat”—but my mind and my body refuse to get the message. I keep checking the clock, counting the minutes until she walks in the door.

She drops her backpack and lets me hug her, offering a quiet yeah when I ask if she’s okay. Only after she’s settled on the couch with the dog in her lap does she say how scared she was. I tear up as she describes double-checking the height of the classroom windows, going over the evacuation plan with her teacher in case they were told to run. She tells me that a classmate got accidentally locked out and then knocked to be let back in, making them all gasp—“It’s the shooter!”—until several kids pointed out that a shooter probably wouldn’t knock.

Later, we get an email from the school explaining how the rumors got started and assuring us that our kids were never actually in harm’s way. My daughter goes back to class the next day, and the one after that. Back to business as usual, back to “normal.” Because this is what passes for normal in our country: The gun industry—and lawmakers beholden to it—have worked to make any slight attempt at reform a nonstarter, content to let their interpretation of the right to bear arms overshadow our kids’ right to attend school free from the fear of gun violence. And so, every day, our children enter their schools and assume a risk we cannot shield them from. All the while, we know that the next school shooting will happen, and soon, and that we have not done even the bare minimum to try to prevent it.