Teaching the new ABCs of school shootings
Schools are teaching our children and grandchildren a different set of ABCs than we learned.
Now they are learning A = avoid, B = barricade and C = confront.
This is how students and teachers are being taught they should react in the event of an active shooter in their school.
“Avoid” by running and hiding, “barricade” school rooms with all available locks and furniture and, as a very last resort, “confront” the shooter by throwing things at him or advancing en masse to disarm him (knowing, of course, that some are going to die). What an ugly picture! But such drills and plans are necessary, and our educators, police, first responders and students themselves are devoting a great deal of their time and energy and our public money to this.
Just in the last two weeks, the Upper Darby School Board began a debate on whether it should start arming some of its security guards, an active shooter drill took place at Monsignor Bonner-Archbishop Prendergast Catholic High School and District Attorney Katayoun M. Copeland hosted a countywide summit on school safety attended by more than 200 school administrators and law enforcement personnel.
In the meantime, school districts all over the state are rushing to meet various deadlines to apply for a pot of $60 million in state money – Act 44 – that the Legislature approved last June to provide school safety programs to public and private schools.
On Feb.14, 2018, a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., killing 17 students and staff members and injuring 17 others.
Now we are experiencing the educational equivalent of “Let’s roll!”
Parkland seemed to be a tipping point in the debate over school violence and mass shootings, the point at which a whole lot of people throughout this country finally said, “We have to do something about this.”
The subsequent March for Our Lives, the student activists who are still touring the country even as they try to get on with their own lives, the formation of new citizen groups and the outpouring of new energy in established gun safety groups – all of that is due to the shooting in Parkland.
It is reassuring and downright amazing what is already being done here in Delaware County to prevent a mass shooting in our schools.
In some districts, perhaps all, every school door is locked and secured and visitors must be buzzed in, surveillance cameras are ubiquitous and many districts are developing a close personal relationship with local police.
Every school is equipped with a panic button linked to the county emergency response 911 system.
Pushing the button summons police who are now being trained and equipped to go in immediately to stop a shooter in his tracks. No dithering outside while children die.
Hospitals, EMTs and local fire departments are all coordinated and first responders are being retrained in measures to control bleeding. The county is handing out tourniquets!
The schools are not neglecting the mental diseases that spark a desire to go down in history as the killer of the most humans in a single mass shooting, though that is a much harder issue to come to grips with.
Wallingford-Swarthmore School Superintendent Lisa Palmer explained at a recent symposium that her educators closely observe Strath Haven high school students for signs of depression, bullying, stress and the mental illnesses that usually don’t emerge until late adolescence.
But she says, the great unsolved piece of the puzzle is that even when troubled teens are identified, our county lacks the professionals to provide care and support for them and the facilities to take in children in crisis.
“See something, say something” led to the arrest of an exchange student at BonnerPrendie who was amassing weapons and ammunition and told another student he was going to carry out a mass shooting.
Thankfully, we’ll never know how many deaths that student may have averted by saying something.
Timothy Boyce, the director of emergency services for Delaware County, explained at the same symposium that it is the potential mass shooter that keeps him up at night.
It may take only two or three minutes for police to get to a school under attack and go in, he explained, but a determined shooter can cause great destruction in that two to three minutes.
The engine that drives all of this is our American gun culture, the ubiquity of guns, the easy access to guns, even by the most psychopathic in our society, the mindless worship of guns and the archaic Second Amendment.
Now year after year Pennsylvanians must spend $60 million, money that could have gone to education, to prevent something that may never happen at all – because it so easily could.
The ABC drills, are reminiscent of the Cold War nuclear attack drills – get under your desks, cover your heads (and, most of us added, “kiss your butts goodbye”).
In the event of a nuclear attack, those drills would have been useless, but they are indelibly etched on the psyches of entire generations.
Some parents fear psychological damage will be done to their kindergarteners and first graders who are instructed to participate in active shooter drills, even if they are not told that’s what they are doing.
That probably cannot be helped. Even very young children know the score.
In 1985 I was a parent chaperone of first graders on a trip to the zoo. The route took us within sight of Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia only a week or so after the city bombed the group MOVE and burned down the entire block.
Every child rushed to that side of the bus to see the damage and chattered excitedly among themselves about the bombing.
They all knew five children had died there.
Seeing 17 of their classmates slaughtered probably did great psychological damage to the Parkland students, and that is what it took to get students all over the country up and working toward preventing school gun violence.
Maybe a little psychological damage is a good thing. It beats being shot to death.
Jodine Mayberry is a retired editor, longtime journalist and Delaware County resident. Her column appears every Friday. You can reach her at jodinemayberry@ comcast.net.