If a threat, phone, internet, air-drop, social media…the entire district should be shut down and kids sent home or told to stay home.

TLDR: 162 school shootings in the US in five years is not enough to concern our society of the mental and physical safety of our students and educators.

I’ve been teaching over 20 years and it is an age old problem. Kids calling in threats to schools. We have entered an era where our districts need to take a stand and shut down whenever a threat is made. Generally, I speculate, it’s no longer kids trying to get out of a test. Instead it is a sophisticated anti-social, fascist, destruction mongering sect of the society making the “unfounded threats”. My school has had three such threats I am a water of this year, two in the last month. We get an email and phone call from the district explaining how they know the threat is unfounded and school will go on as normal.

We did have a code yellow for two hours on one of the threats because it was an air-drop from within the building. No person was caught with the air-drop incident, but the code yellow ended after lunch because those kids needed to get to their next class lunch be had or not. The admin did wheel carts around with food, but they ran out of food before they had visited half the classrooms. So again, move on to the next class. The code yellow began at the beginning of a 69 minute block, extended through a 30 minute lunch, and 20 minutes into the last 93 minute block of the day and students were escorted in groups, by classroom, to use the restroom. Of course PA all calls were made when a few of the 2000 students were still roaming after their escorted bathroom break and movement to the next class.

Until the public sees how many threats are made each year in our schools, and parents/families/bussing services are made to figure out what to do with their 3, 4, 20 times a school year when the schools shut down due to threats, nothing will change. In the past five years there have been 163 school shootings. Not assaults, not stabbings, not bullying, not sexually motivated crimes; school shootings, you know, with actual guns. 162 school shootings is not enough to make news for concerns. What is the number that will break the line of “being enough”?

The only way school safety will ever be taken seriously is if parents are called to pick up their children every single time a threat is issued.

Edit: but hey it is teacher appreciation week and a church down the street brought the teachers breakfast today. Not admin, not the district, a church.

Submitted May 08, 2023 at 09:44AM by NeverDidLearn https://ift.tt/bfopnIP