WE CAN BE THE CHANGE

You’re sitting in class, eyeing the clock, waiting for the seconds to tick away, and waiting for the sweet sound of the bell to release you into the hall for another six minutes before you have to go to your next class.

Except, this time, something is different. It is the last period of the day and there’s only about 20 minutes left until you are completely free. Suddenly, you hear a loud noise ringing throughout the school, but it’s not the bell that you’ve come to love, the bell that dismisses you. It’s the fire alarm. Good, a fire drill; it’s another reason to not be in class, so you get up and head for the door.

This fire drill isn’t a fire drill at all, though. This is something very different.

You and hundreds of other students’ lives are about to be transformed forever. An arsenal of popping sounds are ringing through your ears, louder than you could ever imagine. Your brain is trying to tell you that it’s anything else than what it really is – maybe it’s construction or just a loud machine. In reality, you know that this is the sound of a gun being fired and that nothing will ever be the same, so you scramble for safety in hopes of making it out alive.

This is what hundreds of students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida had to go through and what countless other students just this year have had to go through. There have been 21 school shootings in the first 59 days of this year, based on data from Everytown for Gun Safety, a group that advocates for gun control.

Everytime a school or mass shooting happens, the country goes through the same cycle. It starts with thoughts and prayers offered to those directly affected. Next, comes outrage and finger pointing. Then, comes the gun control debate and advocating for mental health awareness along with no legislation passed in Congress, and eventually, we forget and wait for another to occur, where we then repeat the whole process over again.

“I don’t think [people] are surprised anymore because school shootings have been going on for so long and they become normalized in American culture,” said junior Yar Madit. “I think [this] has kind of desensitized us. At first, we were shaken up and we were trying to fight for gun control, but now it’s just, ‘This happened. What can we do about it, since the government isn’t doing anything?’”

Unfortunately, a deadly shooting can happen in any place at any time, including at Southeast, and the cause of these types of shootings are varied with none having justifiable means. Some factors may be making it easier for these to occur, however.

“I think it’s easier to gain access to guns, since it is our Second Amendment right, [and] a lot of people have them in their homes,” said Madit. “Places that sell guns don’t have background checks that are fully developed, so people can slip into the system easily and get guns, [even] if they’re not the right candidate for [obtaining them].”

Junior Chase Alphin attributes school shootings to a mixture of many unfavorable factors and says you can’t boil the cause down to just one thing.

“I think it’s a combination of the wrong people having access to firearms [and] mental health. Some people just aren’t taught that you don’t do that kind of stuff. And bullying is an issue. I would guess that an area that has [that] at a higher rate would be more susceptible to those attacks,” said Alphin.

How do we possibly prepare for something like this? Is Southeast prepared for this and are we personally prepared for this? Can anyone truly be prepared for this? Is there a way to prevent these shootings from ever happening or to drastically reduce the amount that occur? These are the difficult questions that we have been asking since school shootings have existed and to this day we are still asking them.

“I don’t think you can ever be too prepared for a possible situation like that to occur. I think we constantly have to keep updating some of our training and working with the staff and administration here. I think you constantly have to be trying to improve where you’re at and the things you’re doing, but we hope that the things that we have in place are good if we would have a situation like that,” said Lincoln Police Officer and LSE School Resource Officer, Mike Holm. “We really want to hopefully prevent any of those if possible and some of them you probably can’t, if you don’t have any prior information to act on.”

English teacher Greg Spangler says that you have to prepare for how you will react both physically and emotionally. When threatened, the brain will start working very differently in order to cope with mounting fear. For example, when people are in shootings and hear the popping of gunfire, they often say they thought it was just some loud noise that’s normal to hear. When the shooting started in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day, many students said they believed it was just balloons being popped.

“The very first thing we do as human beings is we deny what’s going on,” said Spangler. “We want the narrative of the day to continue exactly as our brains imagine the narrative of the day to continue. We will deny until the very last minute that anything bad is going to happen.”

With the recent shooting, Principal Toalson and LSE administrators have been reviewing procedures of all emergency drills, including the lockdown, lockout, evacuation, and shelter drills. These drills are known as a standard response protocol and are supposed to be the best safety measures to keep as many people safe as possible.

Spangler takes drills very seriously and hopes his students do, too. He believes that students and staff need to practice a lockdown drill during passing period, when students aren’t all in designated classrooms. The shooting in Parkland started after a fire alarm went off and people were all out in the halls. They had to quickly find a safe place when they realized there were shots being fired. Conducting a drill during passing period could help our students and staff be even more prepared in the event that this would ever happen.

Nobody would ever want to find themselves in this horrible situation, but these shootings keep happening, so what can we do to prevent them?

Officer Holm urges students to come forward with any information they know that might be concerning because even if it is false information, he and administration can look into if it is legitimate or not. They would rather be safe than sorry in these situations.

Alphin stresses that we really need to focus on education and training. He also feels that mental health and bullying need to be addressed.

“If mental health issues are taken care of well and if bullying is brought down, then you’ve pretty much eliminated a lot of the motive because most of the issues can be traced to either someone being mentally unstable or they’ve been bullied,” said Alphin.

We can try to prevent and prepare for a school shooting as much as possible, but it is nearly impossible to 100 percent guarantee that our school will be safe from an active shooter.

Spangler has walked through in is mind what he would do if he was in this situation, but he still doesn’t know exactly how we would react. However, he does have a three option plan that he would hope to follow in order to ensure not only his safety, but the safety of his students.

“Getting out of the situation is the most important. I want [my students] to be absolutely quiet because we have to hear, if shots are being fired, where they are coming from. If we know where we can pinpoint the shooter, then we can potentially get across the hall, or down the stairs, or out the door. That is pretty much option one. Option two would be barricading doors and hiding,” said Spangler. “[For] option three, they talk about arming yourself with heavy objects. In that situation, I’m going to give everybody [a heavy textbook]; not only can you use it to block things, but you can also chuck it. Another thing a lot of teachers can do on the ground floor is break the windows.”

This item would need to be capable of breaking those heavy, pane-glass windows. Spangler has a solid glass paperweight.

Alphin also is unsure of how he would react in the moment, but says, “I would hope that everyone would be okay and the proper justice would be served. I hope it wouldn’t be made into a political statement for someone on either side of the aisle.”

After the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, where at least 17 victims were killed and several others were wounded, parents, students and Parkland community members were outraged and called on Congress to do something about gun control. David Hogg, a 17-year-old student and journalist at Stoneman Douglas, was vocal about advocating to Congress for stricter gun laws.

“My message to lawmakers in Congress is, please, take action. Ideas are great; ideas are wonderful,” said Hogg in an interview with CNN. “But what’s more important is actual action, and pertinent action, that results in saving thousands of children’s lives. Please, take action.”

Madit agrees with Hogg and many others saying,“The most we can do is bring awareness to gun control. All we can do is bring awareness and protest about it because we can’t normalize it in our culture.”

The question that no one wants to have to face is, in the tragic event that a shooting happened at Southeast, what protocols could and would we put into effect to help students and staff remain safe.

Some have suggested having marshalls outside of the school, or maybe metal detectors at every entrance, and even having teachers carry guns as safety measures, but we really don’t know how effective those would be, and Spangler brings up many issues with arming teachers in schools.

“You would have to take the time to train teachers to use them and teachers would need to be comfortable [with handling them].[But] the biggest concern for me would be access. During school time you don’t just want a gun lying around in a teacher’s office, so there would have to be some sort of protocol with a safe, which would have to have a combination, which would have to be changed and locked and secured. When you’re in the middle of an active shooter situation, teachers don’t have time to come in the office [and] unlock the safe.”

In emergency situations, Spangler also says people lose their fine motor skills and they almost have to envision themselves without fingers.

“You have all of this power and adrenaline, but you are just kind of flailing with stumps, almost, and so there are a lot of issues with [arming teachers in schools].”

School is a place where all students should feel safe learning and coming to daily. While there may be debate on how this should be done, some kind of action needs to be taken in order to ensure the safety of all young people and all educators. Prevention, preparedness and change are going to be key factors that we, as a society, need to adopt in order to prevent more shootings, deadly or not, from happening.