School Shootings Put Teachers in New Role as Human Shields
- 6 years ago
School Shootings Put Teachers in New Role as Human Shields
“Last night I told my wife I would take a bullet for the kids,” said Robert Parish, a teacher at an elementary school just miles from Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High, where a former student killed 17 people, including three staff members who found themselves in the line of fire.
Do I ask my kids to help me?”
Many teachers said even contemplating such worries felt far from what they had once imagined their challenges would be.
But the death toll has piled up — staff killed in shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012
and now at Stoneman Douglas in Florida — and is forcing a shift in how teachers view their responsibilities.
“I visualized what it would look like, and it made me sick,” said Catherine Collett, 28, a sixth-grade
teacher in Northern Virginia who has spent recent days running through a thousand violent scenarios.
“We had the basic fire drills.”
Nowhere was the conversation among teachers more intense than in Broward County, where Stoneman Douglas is one of more than 300 schools,
and Nikolas Cruz, charged in the shooting, had been among the district’s 270,000 students.
“Last night I told my wife I would take a bullet for the kids,” said Robert Parish, a teacher at an elementary school just miles from Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High, where a former student killed 17 people, including three staff members who found themselves in the line of fire.
Do I ask my kids to help me?”
Many teachers said even contemplating such worries felt far from what they had once imagined their challenges would be.
But the death toll has piled up — staff killed in shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012
and now at Stoneman Douglas in Florida — and is forcing a shift in how teachers view their responsibilities.
“I visualized what it would look like, and it made me sick,” said Catherine Collett, 28, a sixth-grade
teacher in Northern Virginia who has spent recent days running through a thousand violent scenarios.
“We had the basic fire drills.”
Nowhere was the conversation among teachers more intense than in Broward County, where Stoneman Douglas is one of more than 300 schools,
and Nikolas Cruz, charged in the shooting, had been among the district’s 270,000 students.