School shootings, lockdowns, and scaring the crap out of kids

In my 25 years on the front lines of education, ie at the front of a high school classroom, I never had to deal with an actual school shooting. School shootings are relatively rare in Canada. We had that kid in Taber back in ‘99, and there’s been the occasional teen gang-banger in Toronto hunted down in their high school by gang-bangers from other gangs in other high schools, but overall, school shootings have never become part of our cultural wallpaper the way they have in America. So while I happily avoided school shootings, I unhappily endured many dozens of lockdown drills. You started seeing those after Columbine, but they really took off after Sandy Hook. Usually staff got the heads up that the drill was coming. We were forewarned that an “intruder alert” was pending. Sometimes we even got the expected arrival time. Our job when that alert went off (and the buzzer sounded very much like the tornado alert to me) was to coral the kids in the room, lock the door, and close the blinds. Absolute silence was essential, lest your would-be murderers detect the sound of life on the other side of that locked door. The students were to be kept away from the windows, and preferably seated on the floor against the walls. So you’ve got thirty teenagers on the floor around the perimeter of the classroom, you’ve admonished them over and over re the life and death consequences of breaching the absolute silence protocol… and a kid farts. Somebody giggles. Farts are funny to the vast majority of teens. Giggling is contagious, so that first giggle is followed by a wave, and just as that wave subsides, somebody rips forth a beauty that doubles the decibels on the previous effort, and the entire room explodes in raucous laughter. Lucky for all of us, this was merely a drill. Had there been an actual armed intruder prowling the halls, he (and while I hesitate to indulge gender generalizations, it’s almost always a “he”) would have blasted his way through our locked door and slaughtered the lot of us. I made a point of debriefing the class after every intruder alert. The comment I heard most often was; “if somebody wanted to kill us, wouldn’t they just come at lunch when we’re all sitting in the cafeteria?” True that, but the School Board has to do these bullshit lock-down drills anyway, just in case there’s ever a real shooting, and they have to prove in court they did everything to protect us.