To the editor:
At this, the end of the school year, we teachers look ahead to the routine of school being out, a hot summer, then back-to-school supplies, first-day outfits, standardized tests — and mass shootings. We set up, spruce up, laminate, disinfect…and get re-certified for whichever lockdown program our school system goes by. In fact, at a math conference, it is just as common to ask, “Do you guys use Envision or Imagine Math?” as it is to ask, “Does your district use ALICE, shelter-in-place, or CRASE?”
Finishing my one-hour online course, I go to print out the certificate. In the two seconds that I listen for my printer to start thumping, a news bubble pops up: a mass shooting in Texas.
At school, the topic of mass shootings is the norm. At home, the TV does not even stop its sitcom for the footer, reading of a lone gunman in “a random, isolated incident.” It is anything but “a random, isolated incident.” Rather it’s a “preventable, widespread routine.”
Then it occurs to me that tying the door handle and crowding your middle schoolers into a closet is not normal. That explaining to your crouching kindergartners that we can play “the quiet game” only in the bathroom because it has no windows.
We can act. We can do more than air our grievances on Facebook. For a list of ideas, go to www.everytown.org/actions/. Let’s make this — and not mass shootings — the routine.
NICOLE RODRIGUEZ
Salisbury
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Originally Appeared Here