First Particular person is the place Chalkbeat options private essays by educators, college students, mother and father, and others pondering and writing about public schooling.
“Lecturers, the college is presently in lockdown,” our assistant principal mentioned over the loud speaker. “Please lock your doorways and shut your home windows. This isn’t a drill. I repeat, this isn’t a drill.”
It was early within the day, first interval. My AP Biology instructor turned off the lights and locked the classroom doorways and home windows. What I bear in mind most about that day, again in tenth grade, was not the swift actions of the lecturers, however the habits of my fellow college students. All the roughly 1,400 college students at Reseda Excessive Faculty in Los Angeles feared what this meant: a faculty shooter.
We spent the primary 10 minutes of lockdown in full silence, stealing glances on the classmates who may need been the final folks we might ever speak to. We spent the subsequent two hours enjoying video video games on our telephones and computer systems and trying to find updates on the scenario with the gunman.
Seems, the menace was within the neighborhood, not the college, however we had been all terrified.
A few yr later, we had been in lockdown once more. I used to be a junior now, sitting on the bleachers. I’m on the varsity soccer crew and was ready for our sport to begin when folks round me began screaming and working. As I rushed to alert some youthful youngsters who had been sitting close to me, I heard the coach yelling — not with the tone of somebody attempting to make an athlete higher. He sounded extra like a mother or father, urging their youngster to run from hazard.
Being exterior, all of us sprinted to the closest constructing. As soon as inside, we spent the subsequent two hours listening to the police radio, hoping for an replace. I by no means came upon the college was positioned on lockdown that December day. However as soon as extra, we had been pressured to surprise if we had been taking our final breaths.
All of us had been effectively inside our proper to imagine the worst, having lived by means of mass taking pictures after mass taking pictures, together with lethal faculty massacres like these in Parkland, Florida, and Uvalde, Texas. As of this previous weekend, after we witnessed a horrific show of lethal political violence geared toward former President Trump, there had been practically 300 mass shootings in America this yr.
About seven kids within the U.S. lose their lives on the finish of a gun barrel per day, making weapons the nation’s No. 1 reason behind loss of life for youngsters and teenagers.
My two experiences with lockdown are memorable, however I’ve additionally had 4 or 5 different conversations with my finest buddy about whether or not we had been going to highschool the subsequent day as a result of somebody had threatened to deliver a gun. As well as, there have been repeated faculty shooter threats written on the toilet partitions. Which means there are sometimes safety guards in entrance of the loos, and those self same loos are locked as quickly as the college day ends.
American college students stay in fixed concern of gun violence, in colleges and neighborhoods. The menace impacts everybody, however particularly still-developing younger folks like my classmates and me.
So many individuals — from teenagers who’ve survived faculty shootings to oldsters who’ve misplaced kids to gun violence — have advocated tirelessly for common sense gun management, like stricter rules on shopping for and storing weapons. However the politics of all of it signifies that little ever appears to vary.
Someway, we’re simply supposed to simply accept that attending to and from faculty means risking gun violence, that sitting in school or on the bleachers signifies that at any second, we may very well be in lockdown, quietly questioning if we’ve spoken our final phrases. We shouldn’t should stay in concern like this.
Neel J. Thakkar is a rising senior at Reseda Constitution Excessive Faculty in Los Angeles.
