I’m not old enough to remember the era when students hid under their desks in order to avoid nuclear annihilation. We had lots of fire drills where we wandered aimlessly around the parking lot and teachers grabbed the opportunity to smoke and gossip. When I started working in 2000 in a huge public high school, I was introduced to active shooter drills. Essentially, your door automatically locks, students huddle in a silent group in a corner and you wait, wait to be told the shooter was in police custody. There was a special coded announcement made over the loudspeaker which guaranteed the information was true. Of course, if the shooter killed the office staff you might want to stay in your room. The reasons for these drills were sadly evident since Columbine. In the two decades that followed there have been one hundred and seventy mass shootings in the United States. Over a thousand people have lost their lives.

My approach to classroom discipline was always slightly libertarian. Since my students were juniors and seniors they did not respond well to orders, raised voices, or crankiness. In fact, they felt empowered to answer my question about Othello with their own question, a variation on “Why are you going mental, Miss M.?” I let them go to the bathroom without a pass. I let them eat if they were hungry, I let them breathe, and even laugh. Mostly at me. We had many mock security drills, most of them announced in advance. But one day teachers were told there would be an ‘active shooter drill,’ and students were not to be warned in advance. As the time approached, I stopped letting kids leave for the bathroom. An announcement came over the loudspeaker, a different announcement than the usual, I hit the lights and we army crawled to sit in a far corner, silent, and completely freaked out.
“Is this real?” someone asked.
“Shh,” I said.
“No way this is real,” said someone else.

Then the shouting started and the banging and the footsteps running and more shouting. I could feel deep inhalations around me with few exhalations. The banging on the doors came closer. Several students were crying, others just wild-eyed. I decided enough was enough. I crawled back to my desk and grabbed a bag of lollipops, crawled back, and handed them out. The bangs got louder and closer. We licked our lollipops. “It a drill,” I told them.

A minute later the door burst open and my least favorite security guard was standing there. Most of us had screamed.
“Why is this door unlocked?” he shouted.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You aren’t supposed to eat,” he said. “If this was real, you’d all be dead.”

He looked at my students hoping they would join him in shaming me. They didn’t. But I was given a warning and had to spend ten minutes listening to a man with a crew cut tell me I had failed the active shooter drill. And yet, I would have taken a bullet for any one of them even Shamika who was always making fun of my shoes.

NPR quoted an expert who said in part, “And what these drills can really do is potentially trigger either past trauma or trigger such a significant physiological reaction that it actually ends up scaring the individuals instead of better preparing them to respond in these kinds of situations.”

The suicide rate among the adolescent population has risen to a crisis point. I am currently the “teacher” in a program for severely depressed teenagers who have eating disorders, substance abuse issues, and general depression. I still observe the adults around them being non responsive or downright mean to some of these fragile people. I continue to be kind and respectful. I will always give them the lollipops.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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