Herd them into a corner, cut the lights out, and lock the door. Not the response I would like to give but the one I am charged to do. By and large, my high-schoolers don’t seem to be traumatized much...
I work in security - physical, electronic and cyber. I was asked for my opinion on a recent school design that was intended to keep out intruders / shooters.
Me: “Nice defensive fortress you have there.”
School Board Member; “Why thank you!”
Me: “That was not a complement. Because what you have designed here is a place for a gun man to hold up and take a lot of lives while the police are on the outside and cant get in.”
Member: “oh crap”
We would do them every year in the hospital. Every time we were able to make significant improvements in handling mass casualty incidents.
But we are not kids. And the Boston marathon was a little too close for comfort.
I’m a combat veteran, and recently retired from teaching.
Had someone pulled a stunt like the one described, and had tried to enter my classroom, I would have killed them.
No hesitation, no remorse, no sympathy - I would have killed them.
Dead.
“the parting letter a 12-year-old boy wrote his parents during a lockdown at a school in Charlotte, North Carolina, following what turned out to be a bogus threat: “I am so sorry for anything I have done, the trouble I have caused,” he scribbled. “Right now I’m scared to death. I need a warm soft hug … I hope that you are going to be okay with me gone.”
We are certainly raising a bunch of wimps. We kept the athletic equipment in the classroom closet. I grew up with some pretty tough kids. We were the offspring of WWII vets and understood that evil existed and that bowing to it didn’t work. An intruder would have faced a half dozen of us with ball bats. Not saying that I’m very brave, just that I would have known that was our only chance.