I was sitting on the floor of a closet with eight six- and seven-year-old children. The closet was pitch black, and crammed full of AV equipment that was no longer used. And because the kids were six and seven years old, they kept bumping into each other and the equipment, disrupting the silence with clanging, and an occasional, “quit touching me!” But after a few minutes and a reminder about what was happening, there was silence as we sat there waiting.
It was March 1, about 10:45 am, and we were in the media center when we heard the alarm, and immediately the children swarmed me. “Is this one real?” “Where do we hide?” “Are bad guys going to get us?”
As the alarm continued to blare, I corralled the kids toward a storage room but saw that it was crowded with another class. Thankfully, there was a small closet on the far side of the storage room. I gathered the group of students, and headed for the closet.
Like most schools, we practice lockdown drills throughout the year. The teachers are told beforehand when the drill will occur so we can review our training, and plan how we are going to make the drill less traumatic for our students. This time it was different.
There had been no ‘heads up’ to staff. At that time, we knew no more than the students did. Is this one real? Are the bad guys going to get us? Where should we best hide? I’m not sure how long we hid in the media closet. But during that time, not one child cried or whined. Instead, they were eerily silent. As we waited, I held as many of them as I could, and I said a prayer, please help me keep these little pumpkins safe.
As it turned out, the threat against our school was a hoax, if you can call something like a death threat against hundreds of children a hoax.
The police later explained to us that the whole event had been a ‘swatting’ incident, and had happened to several schools in Colorado that day. At that point, we didn’t know who had called in the threat, and we probably will never know. But we do know that no matter how much we want it to never happen again, it will happen again. And little kids will be crowded into places like dark closets to silently wait and hope that this isn’t real and that the bad guys won’t find them.
The National Institute of Health calls gun violence an epidemic and emphasizes that we have to do everything ‘within our power’ to stop it, yet we don’t. Since Sandy Hook, there have been more than 500 children and adults killed by school shooters. Underfunded (and non-funded) mental health programs and inadequate gun control laws have been put forward as causes. But, it’s been nearly 11 years since 20 first graders were murdered in their classroom, and our response to this tragedy and many others hasn’t changed anything.
As we sat in the closet waiting to be told we were safe, and that there were no “bad guys in our school,” I thought about what ‘everything within our power to stop school shootings’ would look like, and I came to the conclusion that it had to look like something. We haven’t done anything that works. Why don’t we fund more mental wellness programs? Why don’t we try stricter gun control laws?
Finally, I ask our whole society on behalf of children who will inevitably be killed in a school shooting: Can we make mental health programs accessible to all? Isn’t it worth changing our gun control laws if even one child is saved? Don’t we owe it to them to at least give it a try?
Shelley Flavell has been an elementary school teacher in kindergarten, first grade and fourth grade in California, Minnesota and Colorado. She is now a permanent substitute in Summit County where she lives with her husband, son, and two dogs.
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