By Sue Coyle
At 13, eighth-grader Melissa* is no stranger to lockdown drills—drills where students and staff practice what they would do if an active shooter was on campus. She says the drills occur monthly, more frequently at the beginning of the school year, and are fortified by an assembly in the fall about active shooters. The assembly is led by the school resource officer and follows the ALICE Training curriculum. Melissa knows the name of the curriculum without being prompted.
There has never been a shooting at her small Catholic school in New Jersey, but school shootings are frequent enough that Melissa and her classmates know they need to be prepared. They often talk about the shootings that make the news and about their fears for what could happen to them, fears that are not alleviated by the drills and presentations.
“For a lot of my friends, [the ALICE lessons] make them more anxious, because usually people who shoot up a school have some type of relationship with the school. A lot of my friends are worried, because then [the shooters] know where we hide. But my thing is, if we don’t get taught, it’s going to be a lot of panic.”
Outside of the potential for gun violence, Melissa acknowledges that it feels like her school is in a bubble. There are no fights and there has only been one serious cyberbullying incident that she knows of. However, Melissa is aware that the larger high school where most of her classmates will go next year is different. “There’s three or four thousand kids that go there,” she says. “There’s always a lot of stuff happening there. It seems like there’s’ a lot of fights happening there. It seems hard to manage.”
Even within the bubble that is her school, it’s clear that Melissa is aware of the potential for violence. When asked if she feels safe at school, she answers neither yes nor no. Instead, Melissa cites the number of exits that each classroom has, the resource officer who parks outside, and the time it would take for the local police to reach her school in an emergency. She talks logistics, as it is likely so many other students in the United States would do.
Violence or the threat of violence has become a fact of school life instead of a hypothetical. For that to change, the adults in students’ lives—including social workers in schools and in the community—need to find the resources to make a difference.
Read the full story in the NASW Social Work Advocates magazine here.
