The U.S. edition of the Guardian invited student journalists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, to guest edit today’s issue. The articles are outstanding.
Most compelling is this one about the dilemma of teachers: Their training for an active shooter told them to lock the door and go into hiding. But for many, their hearts told them to open the door to save students who were trapped in the hallways. What would you do?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I could only honestly answer this in the moment.
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But I can’t imagine I would knowingly ignore children in peril. That would be too much to bear
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“Sophie’s Choice”
Sophie’s choice
Is not a voice
But merely just a lie
To save the one
From shooting gun
While others stand to die
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If I had a room with a window and could see it was a child in distress, I would open the door. With an opaque door, I am not sure. I would also have to be in the moment to be sure. Our crisis committee’s policy was to not open the door as well.
It is amazing how many non-educators advocate for armed teachers. In New York teachers are not allowed to leave students unattended. Even if a teacher is firearm trained, for the sake of argument, how can any adult leave a room and allow students to fend for themselves under such circumstances? With a locked door policy, it would be impossible to hand students off to a colleague in another room while the teacher hunts down a perpetrator. Non-educators often have no concept of the depth of responsibilities teachers have to their students.
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If it happened during a break between classes or at lunch, then the door to my classroom would have already been propped open and knowing what a firearm sounds like when it is fired, I know that I would have stood beside the entrance watching for the shooter as I waved students into my room before I closed the door. Then I would have directed those students away from the line of fire from the door and told them to lay down on the floor. With help from one or two boys, we’d pile desks against the door to create more material to slow up and stop the bullets if the shooter reached our area.
These killings on public school campuses had already been going on for decades so I had already planned what I’d do when I was still teaching. If the shooter arrived during class time, I’d leave the door closed and locked. Few students were out and about during class time.
But I ate lunch in my classroom so students could come in to play chess or meet for one of the clubs I was the faculty advisor for, and the door was propped open. I seldom left my classroom during the school day unless I had to go to the bathroom.
The odds are that a shooter would probably start in the lunch area where most of the student congregate or out in the fields where PE and sports practice was held. A classroom far from those areas would probably not be at a lower risk for several minutes or longer as students fled the area of the shooting.
However, because the high school where I taught was situated in a dangerous area dominated by street gangs, every day at lunch a squad car from one of the local police departments arrived and drove on campus to sit on the grass near the lunch area so the gang bangers saw them and thought seriously about starting a riot or causing trouble. I’m sure that black and white with the shotgun attached to the dashboard would give a shooter second thoughts about hitting that high school.
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I agree with Lloyd, veteran teacher and war veteran to boot. I too have thought out different scenarios, just in case. We have lock down drills (lock the door and don’t open it for any reason), contaminated air drills, earthquake drills, and fire drills. I always keep in mind during the drills that real disasters call for adaptive thinking because “The best laid plans…” To tell the truth, as I do regularly in class, my classroom is one of the safest places in my students’ lives. I’m not opposed to banning assault rifles, bump stocks, and extended magazines, but the fact is that being in school is still vastly safer than being in a car. Additionally, very few mass shootings take place in what the California legislature calls PLBAO schools (Predominantly Latino, Black, Asian or Other) like mine. They happen in predominantly Not Other schools (some call them White). I don’t mean to be cavalier, but if a shooter came to my campus, I would be very surprised. Hopefully not in shock, but who knows? I am not a war veteran.
Fight for gun control, but remember, public schools are safe. Public schools are good.
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The white student population at the high school where I taught was only 8 percent of the total and the school was a lot safer than the multi-generational, violent gang-infested community that surrounded the school on three sides. The fourth side faced a shopping center.
It’s easy for me to imagine a shooter walking on to that high school campus brandishing his AR 15 and getting taken out by streetwise gangbangers before he has a chance to start shooting. They’d beat him up and steal his AR-15 and probably shoot him with his own weapon.
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At Marjory Stoneman Douglas, I’m not sure it would have mattered. Like in a lot of classrooms (mine included) the door has a moderate-sized window in it. Apparently, when he came to a classroom with a locked door, the shooter at MSD shot out the glass in the window and stuck his rifle in, spraying the room with bullets and killing students inside. We might as easily ask if it’s better to have them trapped in a room where they can’t run or in the halls where they might be able to evade a shooter. It’s all a Hobson’s choice in the end, with the only real resolution being to eliminate the means for one shooter to do so much damage by banning assault weapons.
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Many of the students and teachers locked themselves inside closets and hid there for hours.
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How is this even a conversation? How is this normalized to this point? How did we let it build to a point that children are telling us how this should play out? Shame on all of us who have been adults since Columbine. We should have tried harder, earlier.
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Jaycee,
We have reached this point because the National Rifle Association has purchased the votes of politicians to block rational gun control. The NRA claims that any limit on the right to buy any weapon violates the Second Amendment. They don’t want the public to know that Congress banned semi-automatic weapons from 1994-2004.so it was not unconstitutional then or now. Even former President Reagan endorsed the ban. Given the fecklessness and timidity of our elected officials, many of whoM have sold their souls to the NRA, turn to the children who are literally marching for their lives.
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There is no dilemma. The civic action (led by students and prominent in the revised CCLS for Social Studies) is not an active shooter drill, it is a proactive action vs reactive response.
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