I READ AN ARTICLE HEADED
Active shooter drills are scaring kids and may not protect them.1
This was just one of several similar articles, some behind pay-to-read sites (e.g., The New York Times).
THE ONE PARAGRAPH the NYT2 allowed us to read was headlined When Active-Shooter Drills Scare the Children They Hope to Protect, the leedcq read:
WASHINGTON — After the first day of school at Mark T. Sheehan High School in Wallingford, Conn., Mackenzie Bushey, a 15-year-old junior, came home upset that a teacher enforced a no-cellphones policy by confiscating students’ phones before class. She needed her cell, Mackenzie told her family last month, to notify police should a gunman attack her school.
I was alerted to the articles by Advisen FPN, an insurance and risk management publication that gets my attention every weekday.
When I was in grammar (elementary or primary school) at PS #2 in Indianapolis IN c 1949 we had regular fire drills and — because The Russians are coming, The Russians are coming — bomb drills.3
Being clumsy, I vividly recall tumbling down stairs to the school’s basement to avoid an atomic blast. Later, in south Florida schools, I remember squeezing under the desk or table in another useless exercise to escape a bomb blast.
I don’t recall being traumatized by the exercises, nor do I recall any other children complaining.
When my children were in high school it was all too common to see a school evacuated because some jerk — a student not ready for a test? — had called in a bomb threat.
My Spouse, once a school administrator, had as one of her many duties arranging both fire drills and active shooter drills. (By this time, Russia and the U.S., realizing they could destroy the world, took an animosity break.)
She ran announced drills at the beginning of the school year, thereafter drills sans announcements.
The students in the K-through-8 school were fine. Some of the teachers had to be reminded to be good examples for the students.
Apparently no child or parent came to my Spouse complaining that the child had his or her sensitivities abused.
In Ms. Bushey’s case (ibid.), if the teacher collected cell phones, the teacher obviously knew the students and their ability to use the phones when they should be listening to the teacher or studying. (A modern version of the old “comic book inside the text book” scam many students tried — and failed — in my time?)
Further, if the teacher had all the cell phones, the teacher could call 9-1-1 or the office number to warn the entire school of an active shooter situation. (The teacher should have both numbers in his or her personal cell phone.) Many classrooms have intercom phones that could be used to alert the administration call 9-1-1.
Plus there is supposed to be a school “resource” officer somewhere on campus.
Taking this student’s complaint one step farther, why not allow her to bring a gun to class. That’s a rhetorical question.
I once worked — very briefly in 1976 — as a teacher in an Israeli school. Armed parents guarded the school. (They had special training.)
“My” kids — 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th graders — did not appear traumatized. To be fair, these students had greater worries, such as being shelled by Katusha rockets from Lebanon. Some things never change, but we wish they would. Today, residents of southern Israel and northern Israel live under constant threat of Iranian rockets from Hamas (in the south) or Hezbollah (in the north).
Today, if a child dies of any reason, “grief counselors” immediately are brought in.
Perhaps it is a “sign of the times,” but how did it happen? When did it happen?
Sources
1. http://tinyurl.com/y2pcmv6f
2. http://tinyurl.com/y5rgu4b8
3. My best friend at my Israeli Hebrew language course (ulpan) was a fellow from the Ukraine, then part of the USSR. I learned that while I was ducking under a desk in the U.S., he was doing the same thing in the USSR because “the Americans are coming.”
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Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. Defamation is a false statement of fact. If the statement was accurate, then by definition it wasn’t defamatory.
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