‘We are sitting ducks’

Margy, 58, a teacher in Connecticut, described what it is like to run emergency shelter-in-place drills with her young students. She said she thinks of shootings “in terms of how to protect my kids.”

“My classroom walls are entirely glass, so I must fit 17 children into a tiny, windowless bathroom (not as broad as my wingspan in any direction), and entertain them quietly (with poetry) until the all-clear,” she wrote. “Sheltering takes organized practice; our space is so small each kid has to know exactly where to stand (three on the toilet seat, steadied by floor-bound friends, two on a box, two under a shelf). As the humidity rises, kids draw smiley faces on the fogged-up mirror.”

“I keep a flashlight and A.A. Milne on the shelves in the bathroom,” she wrote. “It’s harder to be nervous when Pooh and Christopher Robin are present. The kids think we practice in case there’s a tornado.”

Winter, 15, a high school student in Oregon, said that she and her friends talked about where they could hide if gunfire erupted in their school.

“I would say I think about the possibility of a shooting in my life regularly,” she wrote. “People in my school talk about where you’re probably going to be safe and where you won’t be (you’re dead if you’re in the library. Chemistry room is probably okay. Fire drills put everyone out in lines in the field like sitting ducks).”



Jan Arabas, 57, a professor at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts, said she worried that one of her students might bring a weapon to class.

“Every time one of my students is unhappy with a grade or disagrees with me about a course policy I wonder if that person will come shoot me,” she wrote. “I am afraid of my students. I didn’t used to feel this way. I think my anxiety began with the Virginia Tech shootings.”



Another teacher who responded using only the initials M.S. said students had asked who would protect them in the event of a shooting at their school.

“I constantly rehearse in my head the steps I would take to protect me and my kids from a shooter,” M.S. wrote. “My kids always ask how I will protect them (our classroom doors are no deterrent and there is nowhere to hide dozens of kids). All I can do is pump up my false bravado and let them know that we would fight as hard as we could and that ‘no one is gonna mess with this teacher’ but I know in the back of my head that we are sitting ducks.”









