School safety has been a major concern in Broward County Public Schools since the bloody Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL. As a result of hard work of BCPS superintendent Robert Runcie (who, by the way, has recently received a “highly effective” evaluation for his outstanding performance and has been given a raise) new strategies have been implemented to ensure safety on BCPS campuses across the county.
First and foremost, all BCPS students and employees were issued new photo ID badges. Now they can easily recognize each other on school campuses and know each other’s names without having to ask. This way, a potential or active shooter can be identified simply by looking at the school-issued photo ID. In addition to that, large car decals with school names and logos were provided to car-driving teachers and students. Now security knows whose cars are driven by unidentified visitors, in addition to their cars parked in the visitor parking lot where each space has a “Visitor” marking. Moreover, students at MSD were given free clear backpacks, so that it would be transparent what MSD students carry with them to school, and security can catch violators who chose to bring AR-15’s and other weapons.
As a parent of a BCPS student, I was notified on May 2 via a telephone message that the following day the entire school would be practicing Code Red, a full lockdown. In other words, all activities would stop throughout the school, and teachers and students would hide inside the safest areas of their classrooms. This procedure should be practiced in case there is an active shooter on campus. As Alexander Bell once said, “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”
The morning of the drill, I received a phone call from the school. I was informed that my daughter was feeling sick and vomited in the classroom. She was in the clinic, and I was asked to immediately come to school to pick up my sick child. I jumped in the car and rushed to school, identified my daughter and signed the early dismissal form. I asked what happened. My daughter said when an announcement was made for everyone to go into Code Red, her teacher instructed students to hide in the closet, the safest place in the room. Teacher’s assistant, who was working with a small group of students in the back of the room, led the rest of the class to the bathroom. However, once in the closet, my daughter started feeling nauseous and wanted some water, but nobody was allowed to leave the closet until an announcement was made to indicate Code Green that would allow normal activities to resume. She said she tried to keep calm and not vomit for as long as she could. She did well too. Only when allowed to leave the closet, she ran to the bathroom and let out everything out of her stomach. She wanted to go home. Once home, she vomited again.
As a parent and a teacher, I feel disheartened to hear that my daughter, who is only in third grade, doesn’t like school and would rather stay home and play video games and draw. I used to love elementary school as a child. Besides reading, writing, and math, we did arts and crafts and used to have holiday celebrations and costume parties. I didn’t attend an American school though. In the USA, I’ve only experienced school as a teacher. In Russia, we didn't have to prepare for college in third grade and take standardized tests. For some strange reason, we never had fire drills, tornado drills, evacuations or lockdowns. I don’t know why Russian leaders in education didn’t think about the possibilities of all of these horrible events, so we could better prepare for them. In my ten years of schooling, I never saw a fire in school or a tornado outside, never heard of a gas leak or a bomb threat, not to mention an active shooter on campus! I had no clue of such things! We didn’t have cameras or security guards or fences around our school, and if my friend and I wanted to skip, we would just walk out of school and go home, or just head home after PE to take a shower, have a snack and watch a movie. I don’t know why nobody called our parents to notify them of their children being missing from school. Police weren’t looking for us either.
Now, looking back I’m thinking what a weird country I came from! Those people need to know how to supervise their kids properly and prepare for life! I don’t know why though, but I don’t hear of school fires or bombings or tornadoes destroying school buildings or mass school shootings there. The only massacre that made world news was in 2004, in Beslan, when a group of Islamic militants imprisoned over 1,100 people as hostages, including 777 children. That crisis ended with the deaths of 334 people including 186 children. I will never forget the heart-breaking images of small bloody bodies carried out of the school building and grieving parents crying their eyes out. Even thinking and writing about that now gives me goosebumps and makes my heart sink…
Strange as it may seem, but the Department of Education didn’t start practicing anti-terrorist drills in schools throughout the country. No new school policies were created to ensure children’s safety and prevent another horrific tragedy from happening. Instead, the government went after the terrorist group and conducted an investigation to find out who and how prepared the school siege as well as what those people’s motives were in order to prevent another tragedy from happening. Fourteen years passed. No school massacres.
Looking at the current situation in America, I wonder if our leaders really do want to stop mass shootings. With issuing ID badges? Providing students with clear backpacks? Practicing lockdowns and hiding in closets? Are they trying to mentally prepare students, teachers and parents for the next shooting, so that we know how to hide and survive in the public school combat zone? Is our entire country turning into a combat zone now? Watching and reading the news, I feel that it is. Is that what freedom and democracy ultimately lead to… a civil war?..
Comments (0)