The back-to-school season is filled with so many different feelings, regardless of whether you’re a teacher, a student, or a family member. In my house, excitement and joy usually mix with a bit of anxiety in the early fall. But this year, we experienced a lot of fear and upset, as our first full week of school included six threats of gun violence within our district.
The beginning of the school year should be a time to focus on belonging and new connections. Instead, our district had to focus on threats that caused panic and undermined everyone's feeling of safety. Our superintendent handled it well; she took it seriously, and communicated regularly with families, providing the information she could. All schools remained open over the course of the days, though after school activities were canceled after the first threat of a shooting at a football game. Physical education classes were all held indoors, outdoor recess was canceled, and every school had a police presence. Many families (about 50% at the high school and middle school, slightly less at the elementary schools) kept their children at home. Social media went wild, with different parents saying what they’d heard, which held a kernel of truth, though not the full story. Finally, at the beginning of the next week, the FBI agents who had been working with the local police shared that the threats did not pose an imminent danger and were part of a hoax, known as swatting. While it was reassuring to hear that violence on school grounds was not a worry, the fear that it caused was real and destabilizing.
Our schools should be safe places for kids to learn and adults to work. It’s really that simple. In the height of fear and before we knew it was a hoax, some parents suggested that we should have metal detectors in all our schools as well as daily bag checks. It can feel natural to jump toward the solutions we think may keep us safer, even if, in practice, they often come at the cost of kids feeling alienated and unwelcome. Our district was lucky that the threat did not turn out to be real, but it left school staff and families feeling vulnerable. Still, there are things we can advocate for in the interest of safety:
1) Strict gun laws: In a conversation about what causes school-based violence, usually there are two primary answers—access to guns & mental health distress. If we want to keep kids at school as safe as possible, we should be advocating for restrictions on gun ownership, how guns and ammunition are stored, and waiting periods with background checks.
2) Mental health services for students and staff in schools: Increasing access to mental health services benefits everyone. We never know when anyone will have hit a limit on what they can manage personally, regardless of age. Students should be able to be referred to someone at school who can help get them immediate access to the services they need. Similarly, the threats of working in a school only seem to get worse as time goes on. Staff members need a safe place to voice their concerns.
3) Free breakfast and lunch for all students, regardless of income: All kids should have enough to eat. The best way to account for this is by feeding them two meals at school. When kids can always count on access to food at school, their brains and bodies are more available for engaging in school, which will also allow them to feel a greater sense of belonging at school. When students feel like they are truly a part of a school community, that school becomes safer.
4) Looping: Relationships are the bedrock of a healthy school culture. When teachers and students can get to know each other and have that relationship last longer than a semester or a year, it means both deeper learning about the other AND less time spent trying to get to know one another. Teachers and staff who are in tune with students are more likely to notice the ebbs and flows of life (particularly during the teenage years) and are better positioned to check in when they see something noteworthy.
As a community, we’re expressing gratitude to our teachers and school staff who had a particularly tough job in that first week. I’m hopeful that my community will be able to talk about what happened, what feelings rose to the surface, and what kinds of actions we’d still like to take. Most of all, though, I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to get back to the real work of back-to-school season, creating connections and building belonging within our classrooms and schools.
If you’re a teacher who’d like help thinking about how to do that, let us know! We’d love to help.
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