We, the teachers, cannot fix this for you

Okay. This is my third version of this post. The first was mostly just rage. The second centered on racism and children and emotions, and this, this is just going to be informative. I’m a middle school teacher in Texas, and though I mostly only know Uvalde as a town I pass through on car trips, it’s a town for which I have a clear mental picture in which to place the grisly events of last week.

If you are not familiar with the term "security theatre" or "theatre of security", here's a nice definition from this article from Mic magazine - "security measures that look like they're doing a lot when, in reality, not much is being achieved". The article (https://www.mic.com/.../after-911-the-us-leaned-into...) is about increased security measures after 9/11.

Many of which were designed to make us _feel_ safer, without actually doing anything substantive to make us safer.

After every school shooting, elected leaders at all levels of government have enacted walls-in security theatre measures to pacify the public, while simultaneously removing safeguards in gun policies and actively making guns more widely available, easier to buy, easier to carry in public, and allowable into public spaces where they weren't previously allowed.

When I say "walls-in", I mean security measures that take place within the walls of a school, carried out by school personnel and by students.

These measures do nothing.

This is obvious - your kid's elementary school principal has a lot of authority in their universe - they have authority over curriculum and behavior and hiring new teachers and disciplining fourth graders that have gotten out of hand and mentoring struggling teachers into being more effective at teaching music, and science, and social studies. They have that authority.

They do not have authority over setting gun control policies in their cities or states.

They do not have the authority or the ability to make a school safe from guns, to protect their staff from guns, or to protect their students from guns. They don't even have the ability to protect themselves from guns.

Walls-in security measures are window dressing. I used to think that they were frustrating and made my job more difficult, but ultimately harmless.

Now I think that those measures - which have greatly escalated in my career - are actively harmful because all of that theatre of security - and every single news article touting them, and every single politician's statement proudly outlining them - it's actively harmful because it makes parents feel like their kids are safer when they aren't. It allows the public at large to feel comforted that something is being done and takes all of the pressure off elected leaders to do anything.

The first time I experienced a lockdown drill, I was a substitute teacher. When kids explained to me what it was, I thought they were trying to pull one over on a sub. I had already experienced an active shooter situation at my old job at MGH - I'd locked the doors of the clinic where I worked until we got an all clear. A former employee had come in and shot a surgeon dead, at point-blank range. But the kids weren't kidding or trying to punk the sub - there really was a new type of drill where kids and teacher pretend that there's a shooter and hide.

That was fifteenish years ago?And those sorts of drills weren't new back then, just new to me. Every single lockdown drill since then has brought the memory of the hospital shooting to mind. Every single one, and I've lost count. I now teach with teachers that I taught myself, so I know for a fact that they grew up with those drills.

Every time I see a social media post of a parent recounting how uncomfortable it makes them for their kids to experience these drills, it makes me just a bit angry - because parents make posts like that and then just move on. Meanwhile, their kids, and me, and my colleagues, have to go through them over and over and over again year after year, until those kids are old enough to be teachers and then do the drills with their own students. Literally. While their parents - and society collectively- will be uncomfortable with that fact for a few minutes every few years.

But the lockdown drills are nothing. They are old news and woven into the fabric of school life. Security theatre measures escalate after every school shooting, and since we keep having school shootings, there have been many, many, escalations.

These days, it's not just the lockdown drills. It's the badge entry locks, the ubiquitous cameras, the badges so we can be identified if we're shot. I'm not being neurotic - that is the actual, stated reason I've been told multiple times. I thought of that when reading about how the AR-15 so mutilated the kids and teachers at Uvalde that the parents and families of the teachers had to wait hours for results of DNA to identifiy the bodies of their loved ones.

There's also the mandatory trauma bleeding training and trauma bleeding kid I'm forced to keep in my classroom. I've spoken about that here. During that training, we sat through grisly diagrams of broken and bleeding body parts, as a nurse had to awkwardly and euphemistically address the fact that it is very much an expectation that when it comes right down to it, we're expected to die at work to save others.

I had to step outside to take a breather during that training.

The detail that gets me to this day from that training is the fact that the kit - which I keep behind my desk, next to the extra watercolor sets - contains two different kinds of tourniquets. There's the more effective tourniquet, and the smaller tourniquet. The nurse told us we'd have to choose between them in an emergency situation. I asked her why we wouldn't just choose the more effective one every time?

It's because the more effective one was developed for combat soldiers, which makes total sense - lots of trauma bleeding medicine is developed on battlefields. But they're made for adult limbs, because they don't make tourniquets for combat in child sizes.

One year, the training was produced locally, cast with local students, and filmed at a local school. Unfortunately for me, one of the local students was one of my old students, and the school was a campus where I'd worked, right in front of my old classroom. Just put yourself in my shoes for a little minute. I mean, I don't even know how to explain how I felt in that moment, but let me tell you that being forced to watch a video of kids that I care about pretending to be shot and killed outside of the classroom where I work and teach every day by armed adults was one of the most stomache churning experiences of my career.

We (kids, teachers, administrators) don't take chances. I've had instances over the years - all false alarms - in which we were rushed into the building by a police office yelling "SHOOTER", or kids frantically pounding on a locked exterior door because they thought they heard gun shots. And in each of those instances, we just hunker down and reassure kids while they check in with their parents and whimper and we wait to be told that it really is a false alarm. I barely even told anyone after work. That's just life in America.

And y'all. It's not that schools are particularly vulnerable - more vulnerable that grocery stores, or Walmarts, or churches, or synagogues - all sites of recent mass shootings. But the measures taken there are minimal compared to those at schools. Nobody has turned the grocery stores into fortresses. I truly believe that it's mostly because society both wants to feel that kids are safe but also to do it with the least amount of inconvenience to themselves. If shopping for groceries in the US resembled what it feels like and looks like to be a fourth grader or to teach the fourth grade in this country - if people had to experience that when they went to pick up milk, or at their own offices, I firmly believe that sensible, substantive gun policies would be passed the next day.

I also mean inconvenience in the sense that because it's a contentious topic, a controversial topic, one that is difficult to find common ground on, people have been satisfied to watch the schools become more and more like dystopian fortresses rather than confront the wrath of people who must have their weapons at all costs.

Do you remember the visceral reaction of teachers during the fall of 2020 at the prospect of being sent into schools with no vaccines? Where do you think that visceral reaction came from? We in classrooms have been conditioned to understand that when it comes down to it, the American public has never and will never concern themselves with our physical safety. But they'll cry real loud if we die.

It's been some rough years, y'all. Teachers have been beat up on a public stage with an intensity that I never thought to experience, and that was after many years of societal contempt for us. We've been called lazy, cowards, we've been told that we are injecting racist ideas with our students, that we're indoctrinating kids, that we're pushing pornography on them, that we're grooming them. The memory of being in a school board meeting with crowds of adults cheering and applauding every time teachers were insulted will stay with me for a long, long time - one particularly loud applause line was about how making vaccines available at high school was "like the Holocaust".

And this as we taught under the most challenging circumstances in a few generations.

And we keep coming to work, people.

But y'all, schools cannot continue to both be the societal punching bag while simultaneously trying to patch up the social problems that society will not fund or address or fix.

Just as a small example - I honestly think most of the general public had no idea how many millions of childrens' primary source of food for multiple meals a day is schools until the school shut downs made it clear that those meals had to continue even as live classes were suspended.

Society won't contend with child poverty or hunger, so the school patches things up. Society won't contend with the mental health crisis, so schools end up being the first line of defense of counseling and screening. Society won't contend with gun violence, so they make us perform macabre rituals to make them feel less bad about the danger they put their kids in and frankly, all of us in. Society won't even address lack of internet access, because the schools are expected to plug even the holes of access to utilities - my local school district put up cell phone towers.

And the schools try the level best we can to teach the kids to read and write, and provide them food and mental health services and health screenings and internet services.

All while we get publicly shamed, over and over, for doing an inadequate job, by public officials who refuse to either provide those services elsewhere or to properly fund us so that at least we could provide the one service we are supposed to: education, without resorting to crowd funding.

But there is not a damned thing the principal can do about guns.

The schools cannot fix our broken gun culture in this country. The teachers cannot also be commandoes. The solution cannot just be "well, even if the rest of it is dysfunctional, at least my kid's math teacher will die for the students if necessary".

Y'all have got to fix this. We cannot fix this in the schools. Y'all have got to fix this.

Do not feel uncomfortable and fearful to take your kid to school or your grandma to the grocery store and then move on. Feel uncomfortable, and then raise hell. RAISE HELL.

And for my fellow Texans - they're not speaking metaphorically about arming teachers. They'd honest-to-god dead serious. They really think that, and if we don't all raise hell, they're fully capable of doing it. I'd leave the profession, because I love, love, love, my students and I will not stay around to watch tragedy. And putting guns in schools *on purpose* is an invitation to tragedy.

And y'all, if you watched the news coverage of those little kids calling 911 and begging the armed, trained police outside to come inside and help them as they and their teachers lay dying, if you watched that and read that and then you, like my mayor, think the solution is more armed police, I've got nothing for you.