student report Possible The guns have locked down Bethesda Chevy Chase High School into a new familiar, grotesque and self-harming American educational ritual.
“I really thought someone would get shot, I would hear gunshots, I would hear them scream,” said sophomore Lila Benyehuda. “I thought I had to email her family saying goodbye,” she said.
Many parents have received such messages from their children, urgent messages from frightened children crouching in small spaces. They were told that in the dark he was to remain completely still and silent for an hour. the way they were trained.
“Do you know what time you think you will die? said one student.
An art teacher, armed with a stick, stood outside the kiln room, ready to protect the students who huddled inside.
A boy who was late for class was locked out of the classroom and had trouble getting back into it. He went out into the hallway where he was taught to be a sitting target, knocked on the door, and tried to convince the teacher by asking, “Who are you?” who is it “It’s Zach, not the gunman,” reported his colleague Dan Morse.
The school has exploded a media alert updating the situation. Also, most parents began showing up at school after having their children texted from inside the school, unaware of what was going on outside the barricaded classroom. rice field.
Later that day, the administrator scolded them all.
In a message to parents, high school principal Shelton Mooney said, “Students were texting each other and their families today. This raised concerns and complications for police and staff as they questioned our safety procedures.”
But who can blame them? We are no longer in the realm of theory when it comes to these tragedies.
Who hasn’t seen the poignant footage of their parents standing outside their school in Uvalde, Texas?
Damn straight those parents went to school. Angeli Gomez is the patron saint of new parents in our country. That’s how her cops handcuffed her that day and jumped over her fence after running into her Robb Elementary School to save her sons.
A Texas House of Representatives report said 376 police officers outside Robb Elementary School were immobilized for more than an hour while a fourth grader bled to death.
Of course, Montgomery County parents were ready to take their kids to Angeli Gomez right out of the classroom.
This is the reality of our country, not a hypothesis.
“This is an American school,” said Lila, a 15-year-old sophomore. She reported the next day that she would jump every time the door to her school opened and her eyes would be caught by the sudden movement. “Of course it was about guns.”
What she was experiencing was a mild case of PTSD. we did this to them. We are a country that imposes grading systems on movies, music and video games to spare children from trauma, and a country that has laws to remove the word “gay” from banned books and classrooms. Own massacre on a regular basis.
Unlike the nuclear attack school drills that baby boomers tell me they endured (“and we are you OK! ”), school shootings do happen. more often than you know.
Since Columbine in 1999, at least 311,000 children have experienced gun violence at school, according to the Washington Post’s database of school shootings.
Although there was a very brief lull in the carnage (thanks, covid), 2021 was the most violent year in our database, with 42 shootings.12 in 2003, 2016 Compare that to 13 people of the year. We’re only a few weeks into the new school year, so we’ve had 24 students so far this year.
One was here in Montgomery County in January when a 17-year-old student shot a 15-year-old student with a ghost gun in the bathroom of Magruder High School.
But the actual shootings, and 311,000 of them, are just a small part of how we agreed to expose our kids to the gun problem. Hundreds of thousands of children exposed to actual gunfire are bruised and traumatized, but we want all American teachers and students in this farce with every lockdown training we have conducted. get involved in
Schools returned to normal on Thursday after a loudspeaker announcement told children to go see a school counselor if they wanted to talk about what happened.
“I feel really private,” Lila said. “You need to talk about this. We all had to talk about it, but they would really act like nothing happened.”
The shooting threat has been normalized “like a weather warning,” she said.
This is something American adults don’t get — the bloodless lacerations that are the hidden cost of America’s gun culture.
“People in positions of authority are not listening enough to those who have to survive these lockdowns,” said Lyric Winnick, PTA president of Bethesda Chevy Chase High School.
If they listened, perhaps America, even without guns, would understand the deep psychological imprint our gun problem has on generations of children.