Lockdowns, drills causing anxiety
12-year-old’s wrenching farewell shows the fear touching a generation
CHARLOTTE, N.C.— As 12-year-old Ajani Dartiguenave sat on the floor of his classroom Nov. 9, he pulled a pencil from his bookbag and tearfully asked a friend for a sheet of paper.
Ajani is part of the lockdown generation, children who grew up thinking it’s normal to practise locking doors and hiding from a shooter. His mother was the age he is now when two students gunned down classmates and faculty at Columbine High, turning lockdowns into part of America’s school culture.
But less than two weeks earlier, Ajani and his mom, Claudia Charles, had been driving to his school at Governor’s Village STEM Academy when the radio brought news that a student had been shot in a hall at Butler High.
That made the threat of being shot at school real to Ajani, Charles said. So when the voice on the intercom at Ajani’s school said this lockdown was not a drill, he started writing.
“Dear mom,” Ajani wrote. “Right now I am scared to death. I need a warm soft hug. I will miss you … I hope that you are going to be OK with me gone.”
He wrote his address at the top, in case someone else had to make sure his farewell went to the right mother.
Ajani and all his classmates came home safe from their K-8 school in northeast Charlotte. But his heart-wrenching letter drives home a new reality for educators, parents and students in the Charlotte area: School shootings are no longer something that happens elsewhere.
Fear swells more quickly when there’s trouble — and any hint of trouble spreads at the speed of a text message. That’s posing new challenges for a district which, Superintendent Clayton Wilcox admits, had gotten “a bit complacent” about its ability to head off gun violence.
On a recent Friday afternoon, Wilcox announced a slate of se- curity enhancements, ranging from random wanding and bag searches to better crisis communication with families.
According to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the Nov. 9 lockdown was prompted by a threat that didn’t prove to be credible. It wasn’t even a full lockdown, with doors locked and students keeping out of view of windows and doors, spokesperson Renee McCoy said. Instead, students weren’t allowed outside for about 35 minutes, while police investigated.
But Ajani and his friends didn’t know that. Charles says they cried and prayed and a few of them wrote letters.
Charles says Ajani told his younger brother and sister about his scary day at school before he told her. She found out, she says, when her 6-yearold said, “If I die in school I love you.”