I didn’t go to the roughest high school in town, but I didn’t go to the nicest, either. But let me tell you, nothing like time has made me appreciate just how good I had it. The fact that I never really feared for my safety is pretty incredible.
Mind you, even in my day, plenty of high school students did fear for their safety, especially after Columbine. But for grade schoolers to worry about those kinds of things is absolutely heartbreaking.
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Shelley Harrison Reed got the shock of her lifetime after discovering what her 7-year-old daughter had done during a lockdown at school that day.
Someone had called in a bomb threat, but, thankfully, police came out and determined that nobody was in danger and everything was fine.
But, although nobody got hurt that day, the lockdown wasn’t a drill, and Shelley’s kids sure knew it.
In particular, her daughter seemed to take the lockdown much harder than the rest, and left her mother shaken with what she did.
In a Facebook post, Shelley wrote that while her other kids “seemed fine” after school, she saw that her daughter had written “Love Mom and Dad” on her arm that day and asked why.
“She says, in case the bad guy got to us and I got killed, you and daddy would know that I love you,” she wrote .
Understandably, Shelley and her daughter both had a good cry at that.
“To know that my 7yo was put in a position to think that thought is absolutely gut wrenching and it’s killing me inside,” she wrote.
“It’s now been a couple hours, and I can’t seem to shake this awful feeling…” she wrote.
“…feeling of sadness, fear, and plain disgust for this new ‘normal’ our kids have to deal with on any given day,” she continued.
Shelley described just how difficult it is to process the reality of our world today, especially when you have children.
“It’s a very scary and disturbing society we now live in, and it’s heartbreaking,” she wrote.
And, sadly, Shelley and her daughter are far from alone in feeling the after-effects of a lockdown.
Even though schools are safer now than they were in the ’90s, and researchers at Northeastern say “mass school shootings are incredibly rare events,” the fear students and faculty feel over potential violence is very real.
Just look at this letter, written by a middle school student in Alabama.
He and his best friend, both of whom are sixth-graders, made up wills leaving their most treasured possessions to each other in case the rumors of threats to their school proved to be true.
In community meetings on school safety in Washington, two messages from students and faculty became clear.
“Students and educators are fearful of violence on a regular basis even without a history of threats or violence on their campus,” a WEA report said.
“While educators are working hard on keeping schools safer, they don’t have the resources they need to reduce the risks or to be safe when violence occurs.”
That’s not terribly encouraging.
There’s no official information on how many lockdowns kids experience these days, but there’s no question that they’re feeding into students’ anxieties.
The Washington Post estimated that more than four million kids had to sit through lockdowns in 2018.
Some of them were genuine threats, with real gunfire being sprayed at schools, not just phoned-in bomb threats.
These events, while statistically rare, still occur far too often. Since the Parkland shooting in February of 2018, where 14 kids lost their lives, nearly 1200 more have died from gun violence in the US.
Nobody’s going to question the necessity of keeping kids safe, as the lockdowns do.
But the anxieties do represent “a clear and pressing public health issue,” as Harvard child psychiatrist Steven Schlozman, told The Post.
“We have very good data that children in proximity to frightening circumstances, such as those that trigger school lockdowns, are at risk for lasting symptoms.”
With this knowledge in hand, government officials and citizens alike face a crisis: the safety of children in the US, at the hands of our own violence.
h/t: The Washington Post
