Not the Best Way to Spend an Afternoon
About three weeks ago, on a Friday afternoon, there was an incident at Tater’s school. It was a Friday afternoon, three weeks until school was getting out for the summer. There was a report of a kid with a gun at the school.
This is every parent’s nightmare these days. Since the first big school shooting (Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado 15 years ago), parents have had to have this fear. No matter what kind of controls are put in place, no matter how many “resource officers” are on staff, the potential exists for children to be killed at school by a classmate or outsider. As a parent, you really do think it can never happen to you, but the reality is, it may just happen to your child’s school.
The first reports started filtering out to the media around lunchtime. “Police activity reported at TimberlineK-8.” “Student removed in handcuffs, school on lockdown.” “Police searching school for weapon.” “Students being evacuated from school, parents asked to stay away until given permission to pick up their child(ren).”
I probably wouldn’t have even known anything was going on, except that I’m a bit of a news junky, and I am usually checking local news sites several times an hour. The incident began at 11:30 a.m. I finally received a robo-call from the school at 2 p.m., indicating that the children were safe, and were being transported to the local high school, where parents could then be reunited with their kids.
I drove home that afternoon, straight to the school, and followed the procedure to pick up Tater from the high school. We were routed to one side of the high school, where we stood in line to show our ID and have a school administrator match our ID to the list of people authorized to pick up a child. Then we walked to the other side of the school, and waited until our child(ren) were brought to us. Tater looked teary-eyed when she saw me, and she was hot from spending time in a crowded gymnasium with all of the other 500 kids from her school, but she was fine. I think the teary eyes were because she had to walk through a gauntlet of cops and school administrators, and past a few sobbing parents, before she could get to me.
I’m an experienced mom. I’ve been doing this mom thing for a while. My oldest is now 24, and Tater is the baby, at 12. One of the things I was most sure of was that I was going to remain calm, at least on the surface, until there was a damned good reason not to be. Klown had already panicked, and left work early to “be closer.” I purposely kept the information I gave him limited. Tater is his first and only child, and he tends to over-react. Did I feel guilty about doing that? Yes, I did. But I also knew it was the best thing to do.
What Tater needed was someone calm, to handle things matter-of-factly, and to get her home. There were plenty of parents out there, waiting beside me around the high school, that were in full-on panic mode. There were noisy tears, speculative discussions, and much noise as they were reunited with their kids. Their panic only served to panic the children and those around them. The fact was, the student in question (a sixth grader) was in custody, all of the children were safe, albeit with a little extra adventure thrown in, and the police had everything well under control. In fact, by the time Tater and I got home about 4 p.m., the gun had been located in the school. It turns out it wasn’t a even real gun, but an air-soft pistol painted black. And the kid in question had been working with a school psychologist at the time the school was put on lockdown.
When Tater came out, she was still wearing her jacket, which she’d been wearing at recess when the school had first went on lockdown. It had been cool then, still in the 60s. It was near 80 degrees when I got to the school at 3:45. She was sweaty, but she wasn’t taking off her jacket. She complained immediately that she didn’t have her backpack. I think this was the thing that bothered her most. There was nothing in the backpack, nothing important, but to her it was a symbol of how out of place everything was. Her routine had been disrupted.
In the car on the way home, we talked about what happened, and I told her what I knew about what happened. Her class had been out to recess, following lunch, and when the lockdown was put in place, all of the kids on the playground were hustled into the large community room. Several classes’ worth of kids were together in this room with their teachers, and that is where they stayed for the next two hours, sitting quietly on the floor, not really knowing what was going on. Then they were put on buses and taken two blocks up the street to the high school, where the entire student body was gathered in the gym. The biggest complaint Katie had was that it was hot – hot in the community room, and hot in the gym. I thought about all the kids who’d not had lunch that day. This happened right during the lunch cycle, and at least half the kids in the school had not gotten lunch because of the lockdown.
In the end, everything was okay. The student with the gun is getting the help he needs. No one was hurt in the incident. As scary as it was, everyone acted as they’d been trained – teachers and school staff were there to keep the kids calm and allay their fears, every cop in our town was at the school to assess and then eliminate the threat. During the reunification, police were providing a solid, protective shield in a very visible way. I honestly didn’t know we had that many cops in our town. The majority of parents were behaving like adults, patiently waiting in the identification lines. Tater and I talked about things a bit, I reminded her that she was safe, that all the kids were safe, and that the teachers and police had done what they needed to do. Then we cooked dinner, watched some television, and had ice cream. Kind of a normal night for us.
I am thankful this happened on a Friday. It gave us as a family time to process through what had happened, without having to go back to “the scene of the crime” the next day. It allowed the police to continue to do their investigative work at the school, and it allowed school personnel to get the school ready for the return of the students on Monday. It was just the kind of buffer needed for everyone.
Was I scared? Yes. But what I did was pay attention. I paid attention to the information that was coming out in the news. I paid attention to the police saying “parents, please stay away so you don’t clog the campus while we do our investigation and evacuate the children.” I paid attention to the robo-call from the school that told us where our kids were, that they were safe, and that we would be notified when it was time to pick up our kids. I paid attention, followed he rules, kept my head screwed on straight, and everything went smoothly. I know that being calm and in control for Tater was more important than how scared I was. That’s what it means to be an adult. That is what it means to be a parent.
