https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/1-student-killed-another-injured-shooting-outside-richfield-school/89-3e77b3ca-ed16-4ae7-8661-751be3ab661d?fbclid=IwAR2fC-aA9724c8IDPhsuVP5mSAl_hn84Yt5g8cXjqb7vZ3vSn_BlXAE6pCwOne thing boomers did not have to deal with were school shootings like the ones that are increasingly common today. I remember practicing for fire drills, and maybe a bomb scare on a sunny day, but the need to prepare for an active shooter was not part of our school curriculum.
I have been working from home due to the Covid 19 pandemic since March of 2020. I can listen to the radio, watch the news on television and check online news sources throughout the day. The news I’m getting is rife with illness, suffering, anger, violence and tragedy. Yesterday, while attending a zoom meeting, I got a notification of an active school shooting in the city where my daughter teaches. I quickly sent off a text asking if she was okay. My heart skipped some beats while I learned the details of the situation. She was okay, her students were okay. But two students were not okay. Two had been shot while standing in front of their school and we have since learned that one of them died.
The suspects in this shooting are kids. Kids with guns. Shooting kids outside of school. No apparent motive, but names were dropped in the news report of another shooter, another shooting victim, a trial judge, and a local activist. Hearing those names brings to mind the recent conflict in the Minneapolis community around the existing systemic racism, resulting in racially motivated mistreatment of people of color by the police. The responses to those events have deepened the divide between those who believe Black Lives Matter and those who are angered by the idea.
But I am not focusing on all of that. I am thinking about kids going to school and teachers doing their best to prepare for class. I am thinking about my daughter heading off to school for the past two years wearing goggles, face mask, face shield and a microphone so the kids can hear her through all the protective gear. I am thinking about the times she has cried in frustration because there aren’t enough resources to teach the kids, keep them fed and give them the tools they need to learn. I am thinking about all the teachers, para professionals, administrators and others who miss lunch and bathroom breaks, and spend all of their free time planning lessons and learning to teach online because they love their students and want to keep them safe and help them succeed.
The students are the ones we love and want to protect. And in the split second it takes to pull a trigger, we are losing them to violence and bad decisions. Often the shooters are young people. When kids have access to such powerful weapons that yield immediate and devastating results, how do we keep them safe? How do we save the innocent victims, and how do we save the ones who pull the trigger? I don’t know. But I do know if we want to get to a solution, we have to keep asking the hard questions and then really listen to what we hear so we are better prepared to take action for change.
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