Editing will be done; I just wanted to post this while the prompt was still available.

In the time between May 11th, and May 25th there were four school shootings. One at Highland High School in California (May 11th), a second at Santa Fe High School in Texas (May 18th), a shooting at a graduation in Georgia on the evening of May 18th, and finally the Noblesville West Middle School shooting (May 25th). All of these came at such a rapid pace that I didn’t have time to gather my thoughts and emotions, and I just ended up feeling numb for a couple weeks. Ever since the Safety prompt went up I have been pondering how to write this piece. I considered doing an essay and pushing forward all the statics we have on this issue, showing it’s not normal, showing there is a solution, but I felt that too often we forget these events are not just statistics. I would be happy to put forward the facts on this issue at some later point, but for now, I believe we do have to address the role that experience plays in this issue. My experience is not the only one out there of course, but in my peers, I have discovered a shared experience: we do not feel safe and to us that is normal.

A couple years ago, I shuffled alongside my peers into a middle school auditorium. We sat on some very uncomfortable bleachers and listened to a speaker who told us that things were very different now from how they were when our parents were children. At the time a sense of bitter irony swept over me because I knew that our parents likely sat on the same bleachers and listened to the exact same lecture, some twenty or thirty years ago. This year though my peers and I shuffled into the auditorium and listened to a different lecture. We listened to a lecture on Code Red drill protocols. For those who don’t know a Code Red drill is, sort of like a fire drill but for school shootings. During a Code Red drill students and teachers are directed to get to a classroom, lock the door, pull the blinds shut, and huddle in the corner. Watching the teachers give us this lecture-complete with a slide presentation- I realized two things. First, I realized, with another tinge of bitterness, that these drills were not something our parents ever had to do, and second I realized that these drills were probably completely normal to the sixth graders, who sat there in that same assembly.

Kids still in preschool are doing things drills, kids who have yet to know the difference between pretend and reality, are sitting huddled, in the dark corner of a classroom. I was in third grade when I was first exposed to these drills and perhaps they are told like I was that these drills are just a precaution for various security threats. I don’t know. What I do know is that that illusion eventually wears off, without anyone even having to say the word “shootings”,  and then will be left with the same constant fear, that has become part of my life.

From an early age, my peers and I have been trained to expect danger. Now we are starting to learn that is normal. I hosted a letter-writing event at my school, after Parkland. A few people showed up, and we all got to work, with very little talking. Still, as I looked over the letters that had been written they all said something along the lines of “I’m scared to go to school right now,” followed by pleas to the state legislature to do something to make that not the case.

This summer I have found that even outside of school I can not escape the topic. My assigned reading for the summer The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z, mentions a lockdown drill (p. 141-145). The book was assigned to us as an encapsulation of being young in Vermont, and it does that more than it suppose to. The lockdown drill is not a particularly important or dramatic part of the story, it’s just there. That is an honest look at these experiences if ever there was one, because the kids fighting this, we’re still kids. I still try to sit with my friends in class, it’s just somewhere away from the door. I still get worked up about crushes and dances, and my friends still tease me about it, it’s just that all that stops when one of us gets a news alert.

All the action on that’s taking place on this issue is being pushed forwards by kids, and that needs to stop. The fact is we’re just that kids. If there is to be any change made, then yes, we need the younger generation to vote, to protest, to write letters, but we also need adults to do the same, because at the end of the day despite the severity of this issue, we are still kids. The previous generations have not fixed this problem, and in time maybe my generation will be able to, but we need your help.

I end this with the same words my peers and I wrote over and over again to state legislators. “For me, it is normal to be terrified of going to school. Please, make that not the case.”