Cancel 2016.11
Darla
I wonder what the long term effects of this are going to be?
Lockdown: Teaching Students to Hide From Guns, and Hide Their Fears
By KAREN E. DEMPSEY
“Mommy, it’s so hard at school,” Liddy whispers, curled up beside me in her bed, in the dark. “We’re not even allowed to say the word ‘gun.’ But then they make us think about them.”
It is a few days after the school’s lockdown drill, and 7-year-old Liddy is up in the middle of the night asking if bullets can break through car windows. “I’m trying not to worry,” she said, “but it just keeps appearing.” Her toes clench and flex against my leg. Eventually, she falls back to sleep.
Why are we doing this? I wonder. The stakes could not be higher, I know. Newtown remains raw in our consciousness. Of course I want the teachers to prepare, as much as anyone can, for violence. But do we really have to take it this far?
“We can’t have drills to prepare for every bad thing that might happen in life,” my husband says.
Driving the kids to school the morning after Liddy’s late-night worrying, I suggest we talk to her first-grade teacher about it.
“No!” Liddy says, sounding panicked.
From the back seat, 9-year-old Brennan speaks up. “Me and my friends help each other feel better by telling jokes about it at recess,” he said. “Like, ‘What if a drunk guy came in and shot a urinal?’”
This is the most Brennan has said since the day of the drill, when his only comment was that his back hurt from “crunching into the hiding spot.” This revelation, that the kids are trying to find ways to reassure themselves on the playground, away from the adults, is telling. Before the drill, Brennan complained that teachers wouldn’t say the real reason for it – in case “some guys comes in shooting at us,” he said. “Instead, they just kept saying ‘someone who doesn’t belong here.’”
We want to believe we can “prepare” kids, but we recognize that it’s too horrible to actually talk about. And I’m feeling the stress of the silence. The lockdowns are new to our school district. We learned about them in a form letter that came home in our kids’ backpacks two months after Newtown. I don’t know who decided to do start holding them or whether our school has flexibility in how it implements them. I’ve e-mailed the principal and posted questions to the parent listserv, but no one seems to know or want to say very much.
At school, Liddy and I do talk to her teacher, who is wonderful. She assures Liddy that she can always come to her with questions. But really, what can she say? The fears are planted there when children are told to hide in the dark and become “silent and invisible” — a phrase from the sample script given to all of the district’s teachers during their lockdown-drill training.
The script attempts to provide teachers with answers to questions kids might ask. It offers statistics – the likelihood they’ll be killed in a shooting, 1 in 3,000,000 – and the startling suggestion, in dealing with older kids, that teachers tell them the most likely “mean angry person” to enter the school and cause a lockdown drill is another child’s parent.
At drop-off a few days later, Liddy asks, “Mommy, am I safe at school?” I hug her goodbye and she squeezes my hand. “My tummy feels like it’s bouncing.”
Meanwhile, another letter comes home in her backpack assuring parents that the first drill went well. There will be another in the spring, it says, and this one will be “unannounced.” Kids and parents won’t know about them in advance, and neither will the teachers. This is necessary so that they become routine, the letter explains.
The script given to the teachers says, “We will get used to doing them.”
Full story here
Lockdown: Teaching Students to Hide From Guns, and Hide Their Fears
By KAREN E. DEMPSEY
“Mommy, it’s so hard at school,” Liddy whispers, curled up beside me in her bed, in the dark. “We’re not even allowed to say the word ‘gun.’ But then they make us think about them.”
It is a few days after the school’s lockdown drill, and 7-year-old Liddy is up in the middle of the night asking if bullets can break through car windows. “I’m trying not to worry,” she said, “but it just keeps appearing.” Her toes clench and flex against my leg. Eventually, she falls back to sleep.
Why are we doing this? I wonder. The stakes could not be higher, I know. Newtown remains raw in our consciousness. Of course I want the teachers to prepare, as much as anyone can, for violence. But do we really have to take it this far?
“We can’t have drills to prepare for every bad thing that might happen in life,” my husband says.
Driving the kids to school the morning after Liddy’s late-night worrying, I suggest we talk to her first-grade teacher about it.
“No!” Liddy says, sounding panicked.
From the back seat, 9-year-old Brennan speaks up. “Me and my friends help each other feel better by telling jokes about it at recess,” he said. “Like, ‘What if a drunk guy came in and shot a urinal?’”
This is the most Brennan has said since the day of the drill, when his only comment was that his back hurt from “crunching into the hiding spot.” This revelation, that the kids are trying to find ways to reassure themselves on the playground, away from the adults, is telling. Before the drill, Brennan complained that teachers wouldn’t say the real reason for it – in case “some guys comes in shooting at us,” he said. “Instead, they just kept saying ‘someone who doesn’t belong here.’”
We want to believe we can “prepare” kids, but we recognize that it’s too horrible to actually talk about. And I’m feeling the stress of the silence. The lockdowns are new to our school district. We learned about them in a form letter that came home in our kids’ backpacks two months after Newtown. I don’t know who decided to do start holding them or whether our school has flexibility in how it implements them. I’ve e-mailed the principal and posted questions to the parent listserv, but no one seems to know or want to say very much.
At school, Liddy and I do talk to her teacher, who is wonderful. She assures Liddy that she can always come to her with questions. But really, what can she say? The fears are planted there when children are told to hide in the dark and become “silent and invisible” — a phrase from the sample script given to all of the district’s teachers during their lockdown-drill training.
The script attempts to provide teachers with answers to questions kids might ask. It offers statistics – the likelihood they’ll be killed in a shooting, 1 in 3,000,000 – and the startling suggestion, in dealing with older kids, that teachers tell them the most likely “mean angry person” to enter the school and cause a lockdown drill is another child’s parent.
At drop-off a few days later, Liddy asks, “Mommy, am I safe at school?” I hug her goodbye and she squeezes my hand. “My tummy feels like it’s bouncing.”
Meanwhile, another letter comes home in her backpack assuring parents that the first drill went well. There will be another in the spring, it says, and this one will be “unannounced.” Kids and parents won’t know about them in advance, and neither will the teachers. This is necessary so that they become routine, the letter explains.
The script given to the teachers says, “We will get used to doing them.”
Full story here
