“Post-traumatic stress is the result of a fundamental reorganization of the central nervous system based on having experienced an actual threat of annihilation (or seeing somebody else being annihilated), which reorganizes self experience…and the interpretation of reality.”
–Bessell van der Kolk,
The Body Keeps The Score
“The more catastrophic events we’re exposed to as a nation, the more impacted we’re going to be on a psychological level.”
–Jonathan S. Cormer
American Psychological Society
My classroom is a sunless cinderblock box and maybe it’s as secure as it can get. It was a storage closet for the electronics program across the hall before the English department claimed it, and is barely large enough to accommodate my sixteen student desks. Exposed pipes and wiring crisscross the high concrete ceiling above three long banks of fluorescent lights. The door is gray metal with a narrow window, just three inches wide, wire mesh enclosed in the glass. The walls are bland industrial beige. My heavy metal desk faces the entrance, and behind it a door leads into Ms. Gill’s math classroom. We open it during active shooter drills so we can jointly decide whether to stay and barricade or corral our students and run for it. And for comfort, I think; it’s reassuring for each of us to know the other is there.
I’ve tried to build comfort for the kids where I can. The desks are pushed into groups of four and covered in laminated motivational posters. Everything is HARD before it gets EASY,” that sort of thing, even though some things continue to be hard no matter what. I’ve dragged in yard-sale beanbag chairs and a variegated book-themed area rug, defiant in its cheerful reds and greens and blues, to create a tiny reading corner—yes, like elementary school, because there are some things elementary schools get right. Student artwork adorns the walls. I bought a mirror designed to look like a window frame, and the kids were delighted, not because it’s aesthetically pleasing, but because now they can fix their hair without using the cameras on their phones.
I used bright blue felt tiles to cover an ancient, cracked chalkboard, and adorned it this year with poems and images students created based on the topic of self-actualization to support our first unit, Your Best Self. Illustrations of logical fallacies— “Slippery Slope: ‘If we allow students to wear baseball caps in school, it will lead to anarchy’”—mounted double-sided on construction paper, hang from the light fixtures, swinging in the drafts from the ventilation system that gets us as close as we’re going to come to fresh air. A four-foot vertical “WELCOME!” sign, made of wood, hangs where kids will see it as they enter.
I suspect the students aren’t fooled. Teaching similes every year, I open with “School is like a—” and the whole class choruses, “JAIL.” One can’t, by design, get out when one wants. The room is so small that someone standing in the hall outside the window has virtually the whole space in their line of sight. There’s really nowhere to hide. I’ve imagined this room as our grave, logical fallacies fluttering and waving above our motionless forms.
I’ve also imagined the Columbine High School library as it was before April 20, 1999. I recall an exterior photo of lots of tall, wide windows on the second floor. Our library is similarly open and airy, surrounded on three sides by the courtyard in the center of the building, light streaming in. I imagine Columbine like that, with the only comfortable chairs in the building, some hanging plants thriving in the sun, widely spaced circular tables on a quiet blue carpet, glossy posters of celebrities holding their favorite books, the entrance a set of double glass doors. It wouldn’t have needed a giant “WELCOME!” sign; kids and staff would have naturally drifted in there and lingered, ostensibly to read the sports page or renew a book, but really to find respite from the rush and rigidity of high school in America.
It still gets replayed sometimes on the news, if they’re doing a retrospective: the strained, shrill voice of the Columbine High School art teacher, Patti Nielson, hiding under the circulation desk, telling the 911 operator, ”I’ve got every kid under a table.” There were fifty students and four staff members in that room. Explosions are audible in the background, echoing across all these years. The operator asks Patti if she can lock the outer door, and she replies, “I have three children.”
Over and over, she reports that she’s got students under the tables; they’re all under the tables. I’ve done what I’m supposed to do; we’re supposed to be safe because I’ve done what I’m supposed to do. That’s woven itself into my psyche. We all talk about the kids like that sometimes, like we’re moving them around like figurines, like we’re responsible for putting them where they need to be and responsible for the consequences of that choice. We “put them” in assigned seats; we get a phone call if someone has “got them” in the office. I remember a fight in my hallway, kids agitated and milling around in the aftermath. I rounded up as many as I could. “I put all the kids in my room,” I informed my department head when he checked in. “The counselor came up and I put her in my reading corner.” I put them there.
That art teacher controlled the situation, stowed the kids as safely as she could. Kids died where they were placed, under those tables. Ten of them out of the twelve people killed that day, and twelve more injured.
I wonder about her. Patti. She survived. Did her mind circle, later, around the unlocked door? The parents of one of the murdered students said on a morning talk show that they had questions: if she knew how to keep herself alive, why hadn’t she done the same for their son? Even I, with children of my own at home, wonder if she’d have had the time to secure the door, wonder if she could have forestalled the carnage if she had not acted instinctively as a parent first. And what would it mean for all of us if the answer were “Yes”?
I wonder, sometimes in spirals, about the failure of plans. At Columbine the police response was catastrophically slow, giving rise to new protocols for school staff and law enforcement. The lessons we learned will save lives. Now each successive tragedy gets cast, subtly, as a security failure that we all can remedy with more practice and even greater vigilance.
Minutes before a ninth-grade shooter opened fire at Apalachee High School in Georgia in September of 2024, his mother called the school and warned staff that he was in crisis and needed immediate intervention. Because there was another student in the same class that period with a similar name, staff were briefly confused and unable to reach him in time. A parent whose student had also been in the class told the Associated Press, “The school failed them. They could have prevented the shooting and they didn’t.” amid the confusion the boy, who had earlier left the room with a pass, gained access to the unlocked classroom next door, where he killed four people and wounded four more.
There is a strong sense, among teachers, among administrators and community members and students, that if we can just anticipate every contingency, we can be safe. It’s a sentiment that gives us some illusory power, even as it lays responsibility at our feet. Sit up, we’re told. Pay attention. Be vigilant. If something goes wrong, it’s our fault. A number of teachers in my building, myself included, now keep the doors locked while class is in session.
Active shooter drills started in my building maybe two years after Columbine. I sensed almost immediately that they might have validated a certain subset of administrators who would have loved to see teachers take the need for order more seriously. I remember sitting in the stuffy, dusty auditorium on a fall staff development day in 2002 as our principal announced that we’d be watching a video called Lockdown 101. It was widely known that he hated this job. He’d been catapulted into it after spending decades as an assistant principal, dealing with disciplinary problems. To him, we were all disciplinary problems. “I’ve been waiting to show you this; it’s very important,” he intoned with his customary scowl as he stood at the lectern in front of the assembled faculty. Had his hairline receded more in the last two years, and was his ex-football-coach paunch more pronounced? The seats were creaky, uncomfortable, with springs pressing up through the tired green upholstery, and the video did not sound like a winner. People shifted and muttered to each other, and I slipped a stack of student essays and my grading pen out of my backpack.
Then the lights went out and the movie opened on the fifteen-foot screen; I remember a score more suitable for a B-grade horror film and the word “LOCKDOWN” in bold red font superimposed on a shot of a generic-looking high school surrounded by trees under a deceptively sunny sky. This faded to a classroom scene: an English teacher with dark hair and a long, floral skirt walking around her room. Students had hands raised and there were notes about symbolism on the board. Mid-sentence, the teacher glanced out the window and saw a young man with a long gun in his hand, walking toward the entrance. What followed was a minute-by-minute depiction of the armed intruder gaining access to the building. We saw lockdown procedures, yes, but we also saw bodies in the corridor and the English class huddled in the dark, the teacher with one hand on a girl’s back and her finger to her lips. When the auditorium lights came on above us and the screen retracted into the ceiling, people were crying. The school resource officer then strode into the room from a back entrance, down the aisles, with a whole phalanx of police officers in full-on SWAT gear. And there was our principal, off to the side, with his lips pressed together and the corners of his mouth angled slightly upward. No one was grading papers during this staff in-service. No one was chatting with colleagues or ducking out to use the restroom. He had us in the palm of his hand, where we needed to be because he was saving our lives.
It certainly was a powerful argument. During these drills there would be perfect order, as close as we’d come to total control. It would be like standardized testing, but more so; no one talks, no one moves, no one gets a bathroom pass. Students would be passive, moving where they were “put.” Schools love control and compliance, much as they’ll wax poetic about producing twenty-first-century citizens of the world. One of the first things I was judged on as a teacher was my ability to “control” a class. Teachers who “don’t have control” are generally regarded as incompetent. Students must follow a dress code, remove their hats, have passes to traverse the hallways, raise their hands to speak, ask permission to use the bathroom. And now, after Lockdown 101, after Sandy Hook in 2012, after Parkland in 2018, this compliance is cast as a matter of life or death. It’s a logical fallacy: if you permit too much freedom, people could die.
In the spring of 2005, I marked a decade of teaching, still without children of my own who would creep into my mind while I was huddled in the dark with students. I was discussing Macbeth with juniors when the principal came on the intercom. “Lockdown, lockdown, lockdown. This is a drill.” Immediately my class rose as one and crossed to the reading corner, inexorably, like water flows to a drain. I peeked through my open door to be sure there were no kids in the hall I needed to bring in, then closed the door and used my key to lock it. Hanging by a binder clip next to my entrance were three large sheets of construction paper. I taped the black one over the narrow window and then slid the green one under the door and out into the hall. Green meant Everyone here is safe. Red would have meant People in here need help. In another year or so we’d be told to discontinue the color-coded signals, as they simply alerted intruders that there were people, sitting ducks, in the room. Chances were, the shooter would be one of our students, and they’d know our procedures.
My kids were mostly calm, silent, attentive. All but one. Toby, a lanky kid who wore t-shirts and corduroys every day, was on the autism spectrum and had a diagnosis of PTSD. Kids with similar histories are among the most vulnerable to trauma from drills like this one, though these were early days, probably seven years away from Newtown, and we didn’t know this yet. Toby pulled his shirt over his head, a few reddish curls sticking out, and stretched out face down on my utilitarian green carpeting. He drummed the tops of his basketball sneakers on the rug, jerky little flutter kicks, muttering loudly, “Don’t touch don’t touch don’t touch.” The other students looked at each other and back at him. I saw two girls grab each other’s hands.
“Toby, it’s a drill,” I reminded him, my voice barely above a whisper. Shooter drills were supposed to be silent. “You’re safe.”
“Don’t. Tell. Me. What. I Am,” he responded, his words muffled but loud. Several of the kids in the corner made shushing noises. “I know what I need to know,” he continued in a deep singsong voice. “Don’t tell me things I don’t need to know.”
Toby moaned into the floor. Then moaned again, but this time it was almost a shout. The kids all looked at me. Staying low, under the window, I wormed my way over to my desk and snagged a plastic shopping bag out of a large lower drawer. “Toby,” I whispered. “If you will sit up and take your head out of your shirt, I will give you a Tootsie Roll.” He turned his head to look at me, shirt collar still over his nose. I pulled out the package and waved it, I hoped temptingly, in his direction. Slowly, he sat up.
And so we passed the twenty endless minutes of the drill. Toby braced his back against my desk and I handed him Tootsie Rolls, one at a time, until the bag was empty and the principal’s voice crackled over the intercom: “This ends our lockdown drill. You may now resume instruction.”
As if.
The kids in the reading corner slowly got to their feet. Toby just pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. I wished for a phone; our classrooms were not equipped with these in 2005. “Sara,” I said to one of the girls, “it’s all clear. Would you run down to Guidance? Just tell them we need the counselor up here.” I think it was then I started to wonder: These drills….at what cost?
It turned out that the term “lockdown” was archaic, originating way back in the 1970s in California, where I would begin my teaching career two decades later. Many campuses featured classrooms that opened onto outdoor walkways. The danger, at that time, was external—specifically, it was drive-by shootings and similar community violence. Lockdowns kept everyone indoors and away from windows, where they’d be safe from bullets fired from the streets. For us, though, in this new millennium, the threat is inside the buildings. The threat is each other.
So the game changed. There were studies done. Law enforcement officers expressed to those listening that the procedures we’d learned weren’t sufficient, that they told their own children that if (when?) the shooter came, they should ignore school procedure and get themselves out of the building at the first opportunity. The ALICE Institute, founded just after the Columbine shooting in Ohio, developed a new sequence that my building first used in 2015:
The acronym:
Alert
Lockdown
Inform
Counter
Evacuate
When the announcement comes over the intercom detailing the shooter’s location, teachers have to make a split-second decision to stay and barricade or make a run for it. To run is to risk being caught in a logjam on the narrow staircases; if the shooter comes, there’s nowhere to go. If we stay, we arm the kids with books, Chromebooks, anything—there’s a video floating around TikTok about how to use a fire extinguisher—to deter the shooter, however briefly, if he (it’s almost always a male) breaks in. So maybe, like the nine first-graders who survived Newtown because the shooter stopped to reload, a few people can escape.
There were teachers in my building—and elsewhere, I imagine—who complained that as these drills became more routine, students were failing to take them seriously. They grinned and made tasteless jokes. They remained in their seats instead of cowering in the corner. We all had the procedural knowledge we needed, much like we do with fire drills, when kids evacuate the building in minutes but are calm, smiling, enjoying a few minutes of sunshine to break up their day. We never feel the need to fill hallways with smoke or otherwise simulate an actual disaster. But someone out there decided we needed to practice terror.
In my school we now have an actor who, two or three times a year, dons a white jumpsuit with “ACTIVE SHOOTER” stenciled across the back and runs through the building with a plastic AR-15, blowing an air horn to simulate shooting and checking classroom doors to see if they’re locked. Administrators track his movements based on calls from teachers to the emergency extension and report his location over the intercom.
This is standard practice, and there have been documented incidents of schools intentionally failing to disclose that the gunfire and other “predatory behavior” students are witnessing is in fact a drill. This might explain why a number of them in Parkland in 2018, even those who saw the shooter, had trouble believing it was not a simulation. Some schools play sounds of gunshots over the intercom, deploy fake blood in the hallways, or have “shooters” fire guns with blanks at teachers. The American Association of Pediatricians, in their position statement urging schools to end these high-intensity drills, argues that there is little evidence that they reduce casualties during an actual event and mounting evidence of substantial trauma for those experiencing them. President Biden recently signed a bill directing agencies to study this issue, so the guidance may change. But with live action we get total cooperation.
The ALICE Institute is a for-profit organization. School security in this country is a $3+-billion industry, and according to one CNN headline, “It May Not Be Enough.” Evidence and witness reports show that one of the first-grade teachers at Sandy Hook, Victoria Soto, hid her students and was attempting to lock the door when the gunman entered. We live in a capitalist society; once a vulnerability was exposed, we shouldn’t have been surprised when people rushed to monetize it. I’ve lost track of the number of devices the school district has purchased to barricade my classroom door. The metal pole that forked under the doorknob braced against the floor on its other end by a rubber stopper, which always seemed way too flimsy. The steel sleeve that purported to fit over the large metal hinge protruding from the top of the door—I could never get mine to work and felt like I was inviting death every time we had a drill. Lately it’s a magnetic strip, labeled EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN RESPONSE, that prevents the door from latching when it’s closed. When gunfire breaks out, I‘ll tear the strip out of the doorframe and slam the door, which is set to lock automatically.
The New York Times recently reported on an educational trade show. I’ve been to those, and they typically have hundreds of booths offering pens that look like highlighters but actually read text aloud, virtual reality headsets loaded with interactive scenes from Macbeth, and other tantalizing resources that make teachers’ minds race with possibility. Here, though, a different possibility was on display. There were “certified” bulletproof pink backpacks covered in butterflies that would obviously topple any kindergarteners who slipped them on. The bulletproof clipboards and whiteboards and binders evoked images of superhero shields warding off any ammunition, but even if we could hold those items in the exact path of the bullets as the shooter swept his AR-15 from side to side, I’m certain the force of the gunfire would rip them out of our hands. There were whole “safe rooms” designed to occupy a corner of a classroom and double as a reading nook or sensory room, but all I could imagine was the amount of time I’d spend contending with teens who willfully locked themselves inside. These dubious items were on sale for exorbitant prices, and people were snapping them up. Gun manufacturers are not alone in seeing profit in violence; there are countless others who traffic in the terror of American teachers and schoolchildren.
It’s not just the relentless waves of school shootings played and replayed on the news; the “safety items,” the professionally executed drills, and the ritualistic debriefs highlighting our mistakes all keep the fear in the forefront of our minds. We’re victims of repeated collective trauma. It’s well established by people who studied the aftermaths of 9/11 and the Boston marathon bombings that suffering is not limited to those who were directly involved; people with excessive media exposure also tend to develop depression, anxiety, and intrusive thoughts. My daughter Cordelia was in fourth grade the day fourth-graders and their teachers were massacred at Robb Elementary in 2022, and when I told a colleague about my brokenhearted reluctance to leave her at school, the response was, “That’s what the drills are for.” Fewer and fewer people, with each passing year, feel able to assert that my children, my students, all of us, are safe at school.
Every new atrocity whispers reminders in our ears as we walk our own hallways: It could happen here. Every teacher has her plan—where she’d put the students, how she’d barricade, what she’d grab in self-defense. And our connections with each other are frayed by the strain. When I have a conflict with a student, I can’t help thinking, What if this is the one?
A recent thread in one of my English teachers’ Facebook groups, primarily devoted to supporting creativity in the classroom, concerned one member’s proposal that she keep her door locked, allow no one other than herself to open it, and require students requesting access—mostly kids who have gone to the bathroom—to show her their hands before she’d let them in. The Washington Post reports that the chance a single individual has of being killed by a gun in a K – 12 school is approximately 1 in 614,000,000. But it feels likely. Sometimes—after Uvalde, where Irma Garcia was unable to lock her classroom door, after Parkland, where Scott Beigel was gunned down while pulling terrified students into his classroom—it feels inevitable.
The American Association of Pediatricians argues that high-intensity active shooter drills can contribute to what is, objectively, a distorted sense of risk among participants. In 2023, during the obligatory argument unit, I allowed a particularly vociferous group to debate the question of whether we should arm teachers. It was March in New England, wet and raw outside although I could not see the sky from my room. When I asked them about giving teachers guns, they were largely opposed. “It’s too dangerous,” Enrique told me. He was tall, maybe six feet, a Puerto Rican kid who had brightened at the start of the year when I pulled out my unfluent Spanish for him, before later casting me as the enemy because I took his cell phone. I remember him leaning back precariously in his chair.
“Hm,” I responded, careful to maintain a poker face. “Why is that?” Secretly, I was relieved. So, we haven’t completely lost our collective minds.
“The teacher could shoot somebody!” Robbie shouted through the curly, dishwater-colored hair that obscured most of his acned face. Robbie had a complex history with significant trauma, and he tended toward off-the-wall outbursts in class, so I was about to write the comment off when I saw the rest of the class nodding.
“Shoot somebody….accidentally?” I inquired.
“No…..Miss….” Ami ventured. She was wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt and had drawn intricate patterns in colored ink all over her left wrist and arm. In this wild class, she was generally someone with whom I could have an occasional mature conversation, and I knew Robbie drove her crazy. “The teacher could, like….you know, like maybe the kids are really misbehaving, and she just boils over. And if she had a gun, she might just, you know, really lose it.’
“BLAM!” Robbie again, leaping out of his seat. “Maybe now you’ll do your fuckin’ homework!”
I paused, studying the room. “Okay, so that’s Enrique and Robbie and Ami. Um, how many of the rest of you think there’s a serious risk that a teacher would shoot a student out of frustration?”
Seven more kids raised their hands without really looking at me. That made ten out of the sixteen. Miguel spoke up. He was an A student, highly grade-conscious, and often remained with me after the bell to complain that the immaturity in the class was too distracting for him. Now, he ventured, “Everyone knows that teaching is a really stressful job. And sometimes teachers just….snap.”
I pressed my lips together and regarded them, Miguel and Enrique and all the others. The wave of dismay felt larger than I was. Look what it’s done to us. This culture. Look what it’s done to all of us.
The exhaustion of hypervigilance. The erosion of trust and community. The depression, anxiety, distractedness. The willingness, even eagerness, to sacrifice things we value for the sake of safety. After September 11th, George W. Bush had an 80% approval rating, and most Americans were in agreement that there should be heightened surveillance, incursions into people’s privacy. Similarly, teachers, students, and parents embrace the increasingly elaborate drills, even though there’s evidence that depression and anxiety spike in the ninety days following a simulation. One morning, I returned to school after a day at home with my sick child to find students in first period agitated and hard to settle. There had been an ALICE drill while I was gone, and the sub had been unable to lock the door before the shooter got there. “We all died,” Lucio told me in an overly casual tone. Indeed, when I pressed them, they told me the shooter had opened the door, walked in with his plastic gun, and told them all, “You need to lock this door. You’re all dead now.” There was a moment of silence while I took this in. Kids fidgeted and avoided my eyes. One paced in the back of my room. Finally, I asked, “Do you think this is too stressful? Are we causing more problems than we’re solving?”
They all looked aghast at what I was suggesting. “We have to do this,” one responded. “It’s life or death.”
Cordelia was three years and three weeks old when she experienced her first ALICE drill in the fall of 2015. Her preschool was housed in the local public high school, and the principal really did it up with an actor firing blanks as he ran through the halls while admin announced the location of “the shooter” over the intercom. Cordelia’s teacher opened YouTube on her iPad and turned the musical cartoon CoCoMelon up to top volume to try to drown out the repeated announcements. When the time came to evacuate, an aide picked my daughter up and carried her to the rally point. She was a new walker and too little to get herself outside. Cori only had a few words at that point and was not able to communicate her thoughts about what was happening. I don’t know if she cried. I did when I heard the story. Then, I called the high school principal and excoriated him for his choice of words over the intercom. His response: The reality is, this is the world we live in.
May 2024: an unseen pneumatic drill, around the corner from my classroom, emitted sharp staccato pops echoing the sound of my nightmares in the bloody quarter-century since Columbine. In my mind: not the class of 17-year-olds now frozen in their chairs, just for this instant, but the vision of my own children walking away from me that morning. I heard my voice: “Close the door” as I lunged for the phone. Most of the students pressed into the reading corner; Milo sprang to the door, slammed it, and stacked desks against it. I called the emergency number with a small, steady voice in the back of my head prompting me in the space between seconds, Say your name. Say your room number. We waited in the dark for the school resource officer to come tell us it was a false alarm.
I thought, in the stunned aftermath, of calling Milo’s mom: Had that been real, he would have saved our lives. But I shied away from the accusative retort I imagined: Why did my son step forward? Why wasn’t that you? I think of Patti Nielson, with successive explosions drawing ever closer. Should it have been me? Do I owe my students my life, or am I a parent first? The threat, kept by design in the forefront of our minds, forces teachers to the brink of an impossible calculus, an unsolvable riddle that leaves us, inevitably, with visions of blood on our hands.
Jennifer Zeuli is a solo mom and high-school English teacher who writes between classes, while the pasta water boils, and after bedtime. Her work has appeared in Porcupine Literary Journal, Oddball Magazine, Frazzled Lit, and Same Faces Collective, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She writes about mortality, special-needs parenthood, adoption, and is at work on a hybrid memoir about public education. She is currently an MFA student at Emerson College.
