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.
Someone had called in a bomb threat, but, thankfully, police came out and determined that nobody was in danger and everything was fine.
In particular, her daughter seemed to take the lockdown much harder than the rest, and left her mother shaken with what she did.
"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.
"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.
"...feeling of sadness, fear, and plain disgust for this new 'normal' our kids have to deal with on any given day," she continued.
"It's a very scary and disturbing society we now live in, and it's heartbreaking," she wrote.
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.
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.
"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.
That's not terribly encouraging.
The Washington Post estimated that more than four million kids had to sit through lockdowns in 2018.
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.
But the anxieties do represent "a clear and pressing public health issue," as Harvard child psychiatrist Steven Schlozman, told The Post.
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
