Inside the gymnasium of a neighboring elementary school, six white men greeted me and a small group of other district teachers from midcourt. In front of us, a projector screen displayed a PowerPoint presentation titled “Safety Awareness Training.” We’d been brought together from various schools to make sure we received the latest on how to respond in an active shooter situation.
John, the presumed leader of the training, introduced each of the men—medical professionals, military, police—and himself, at length. John’s biography, which included his career as a correspondent for Fox News, filled an entire slide. They all wore jeans and jackets or vests they never unzipped, the outfits of men who buy their clothes at Bass Pro Shops when shopping for fishing poles and guns. This is Texas, where the presence of any one of these men in everyday life may ring no alarms. But as the leaders of professional development for educators, the lineup of six was disorienting.
“I also proudly served as counsel for the Bush administration and now the Trump administration,” John boasted. As much as I wanted to say he didn’t know his audience, he was speaking to a mostly white crowd in Waxahatchee, a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth. I couldn’t assume anything about anyone outside of the three English teachers who had also come from my high school. No one reacted in any visible way to John’s résumé.
He ended the introductions by pointing to a guy at the end: “And the one in the NRA hat is Pete. He’ll be playing our bad guy today.” Almost everyone laughed, and I felt the uneasy split between me and the rest of the room widen.
Pete’s personal qualifications were never mentioned.
Throughout the morning, four of the men took us through training sessions. Two of the men never spoke, and I was unsure of their exact purpose in being here. Pete glared at us. The other guy zoned out. When one of the session leaders pointed and asked if he had anything to add, he threw his hands halfway up, as if accused, and shook his head.
Unlike some districts across the nation, and although we lived in gun-loving Texas, our school had not opted to arm teachers. I could tell these men would have preferred to train us with guns. I was sure they offered an alternate training for that very purpose, perhaps even advertised to schools and businesses via pamphlet, during which point Pete and his silent partner would likely have a more active role. We probably bored these men, armed only with student desks and filing cabinets we could tip in front of a door.
That was an important part of our learning in this experience: we needed to see every classroom supply or furniture piece as a potential shield or weapon. If we couldn’t have real weapons, we needed to get creative. I kept a large bookshelf by the entrance to my room. I could push it over with enough time. But then there was the Chromebook cart, which actually stood between the door and the shelf. It wasn’t tall enough to block the window in the door. I would need to move the Chromebook cart so that the bookshelf was unimpeded on its way down.
One of the drawbacks of my room was that our high school classes were mostly held in indoor portable buildings, and my room had about a quarter of it taken out by the counselor’s office. This made my space significantly smaller when fitting up to twenty-seven high school seniors in that many desks. But in the event of a shooting, that wall obstruction could be the perfect hiding place. Maybe it was not such an obstacle after all, if it was going to save our lives one day. This is how my brain came to be rewired. I would learn to see mundane elements of my English classroom as useful resources or threats to the safety of me and my students. That was something I needed to be prepared for, inarguably. But in that new mindset of ongoing calculation, I could feel the undertow of a different kind of rewiring—the acceptance that the only way to prevent my class from dying was in the moments leading up to a shooting. This is how our brains came to be rewired, not just during the professional development experience but through each new shooting, answering the question of what you would do if you found yourself in an open space, a classroom, or a movie theater.
In the morning session, opinions reigned. Two of the men told us whatever came to mind during the hour they had us. Unscripted, they made up the training moment-to-moment, bouncing from one tip to another. After John’s initial PowerPoint presentation, there were no more slides. I got the feeling the men were making it up along the way.
We were to understand that, in the middle of a classroom lecture, we might move in an instant from teaching our students to leading them through a traumatizing violent event. They called this situational awareness. The main speaker noted that these rules could also be applied anywhere, whether a concert venue, at home, or otherwise.
“We have a joke among us,” he laughed, “that we always want to sit with our backs to the wall in a restaurant where we can see the door because that’s just how we think. We’re always looking, checking out guys, saying, ‘Oh yeah, I think I see a prison tat on him,’ you know, just looking at who might be suspicious. We always say that whatever restaurant we’re in is the safest restaurant at that moment.”
The room laughed, save for me and a few other teachers. I didn’t feel particularly safe around men like this, the ones who appointed themselves the heroes of situations that hadn’t even happened, profiling people based on tattoos that told them exactly one fact about them. When I see guns on men’s waists in public, I don’t sigh in relief.
Situational awareness, they taught, was the ability to know the difference between cover and concealment, and when to use each. In a cover situation, we use what we have at our disposal—a clipboard, a chair—to act as a shield while we bring students into our rooms. Once a shooting started, they reminded us, we had a limited amount of time to decide whether we could shepherd students from the hallway, bathroom, or elsewhere into our classrooms.
In a concealment situation, we no longer try to save stray students: We hide to protect ourselves and our class. The idea is to use cover until we are forced to conceal. Between the two, we would need to determine the right time to retreat and hide.
Unnerved by the ad hoc nature of the first half of our training day, I started applying situational awareness to my immediate surroundings. I observed the race and qualifications of the men training us, their suspicion of everyone from a man with tattoos to the students in my classroom. I considered their NRA memberships and what they might gain by convincing me that my own students, all Black and Latino, and who were the most threatened by these patterns of violence in America, could be a threat. I looked at the mostly white teachers in the room with me, those nodding their heads in agreement, or the ones who seemed stoic, even bored. I wondered how many of the teachers here taught white students and never assumed they were capable of violence. I wondered how many taught students of color and assumed otherwise. But there I went, replacing situational awareness with my own speculations and projections about the room. The line, I learned, was slippery.
“And when is that right time,” someone asked, “that moment when you stop letting students in and protect the ones you have?”
“Eventually you will just have to make that call,” one of the men replied. “Eventually you will have to make peace with the choices you make.”
Our trainer insisted that we accept that there were no alternatives to our current, imagined reality—that there was no way to stop the trigger from pulling, only the call to prepare for its inevitability. Either we were to pull the trigger, or in the absence of our own, we were to take cover. But I knew there are alternatives: ones that involve fewer guns, stricter rules around their purchase, bans on assault rifles. Our trainer wanted me to forget these alternatives, to cede these possibilities and think in harsher terms. Arm. Suspect. Stockpile. Could I refuse his terms and survive?
I was especially shaken each time John and his trainers blurred practical advice with their political outbursts, confusing the two at every turn. Early in the morning, when John first profiled a school shooter, he made a note that the shooters ranged in “ethnicity and gender,” never mentioning that—with few exceptions—these shooters are white males. In other words, the shooters look just like these men when they were seventeen. And me. But they have identified themselves as the heroes in this story, and they are appointing me to be one, a role I never asked for.
“We can’t make any generalizations about the demographics of shooters,” John said. “Anyone could do it.”
I should have spoken up to challenge them, and some part of me still wishes I had. I looked just like them, after all. But I was also outnumbered. I hesitated to get into a debate with six men who would find the quickest way to make a fool of me in front of everyone, even though they were just blowing steam. I didn’t want to become the object of their masculine bravado, proving themselves right simply by being louder and more sure.
The second session was led by two paramedics on how to apply a tourniquet and insert gauze into a wound. We were to see ourselves as the first responders in a shooting.
“Who’s the first person on the scene to treat a student with a life-threatening wound?” they asked.
Not doctors, not nurses, not paramedics. Teachers. Us.
We needed to be ready to tend to injuries in our classrooms until someone more qualified arrived. We could only do that by knowing a few basics. We learned how to apply a tourniquet, how to stuff a bullet wound. There were various limbs on tables, like a Halloween craft fair, and we lined up to take turns treating each one. I squirmed while stuffing a rubber leg with gauze. I often turn my head away in disgust when a student puts a wound too close to my face as they ask to see the nurse. They told us it required more gauze than we would likely assume, and they were right. I made a face.
“Are you queasy?” one of the men asked, doubting my readiness.
“No, but it’s squishy,” I responded. He looked past me, then kept moving. I had failed his test. I wasn’t fit to be a first responder, but then, when had I agreed to be one?
Hypothetical questions abounded, and the men treated each one with patience and lengthy responses. The questions covered everything, encroaching on each other as essentially the same question with a slightly different situation or emotion, like a kaleidoscope of potential tragedies we were all trying to prevent through sheer awareness.
“What if there are still students in the hall?”
“At what point do we say that we can’t bring any more students in?”
“What if a student is knocking on our door and we know they are not the shooter?”
“What if we are pretty sure the shooter is not in our hallway?”
“What if the shooter is in our classroom?”
“What if it’s passing period?”
“What if the students are at lunch?”
“What about students in the bathroom?”
“What if a student is shot but is in our room?”
“What if we are shot but still responsible for keeping our kids safe?”
Each scenario was case-by-case, and never did the men say that someone was wrong for stating the approach they would take in a given moment. In most cases, the answers were a mixture of doing what one thought was best at the time and then making peace with it afterwards, resting in the assurance that everyone would agree on how trying the hypothetical shooting had been.
The only wrong answers would be considering alternatives to going on like this.
“What if a student has a gun inside the classroom but they’re pointing it at themselves and don’t seem to be threatening any other student?” someone asked.
“That’s almost a best-case scenario,” one of the men responded, “because they’re only going to hurt themselves.”
Most of the group nodded and murmured in agreement. It couldn’t be, but it was: A student suicide had just been deemed ideal. I spent so much time checking in on the students who were outcast, bullied, or depressed, looking out for them like I wish someone had for me when I was in grade school. I was somewhere else, floating outside of my body and apart from the room. In January of the year prior, a close friend from high school had died by suicide. I would never have imagined that a year later, a group of adults would be agreeing that the best ending to a shooting was a self-inflicted gunshot.
In the third session, we played these scenarios out in real time, combining the lessons from the previous sessions. Teachers volunteered to stand at the front of the classroom and pretend to teach until Pete—finally of use—fired blanks in the hallway, at which point the teacher began the lockdown procedure and responded to the specifics of the situation.
At first, the basics: Check the hallway quickly, instruct students to move to the inner wall of the classroom, close the already locked door (district policy since the start of the year), insert the plastic cover in the door window, hold a weapon (a stool, chair, or desk) at the ready, and soothe and quiet your students as the blanks fire at random times.
Throughout each of the scenarios, another factor was added to confound the latest volunteer: A student had been shot inside the classroom and needed immediate medical attention, students were in the hallway during passing period, a student was outside knocking on the door while shots were firing, a student was outside knocking on the door after shots had ceased, a student inside the classroom had the gun and needed to be disarmed.
During one simulation, the volunteer teacher panicked when they forgot how to apply a tourniquet to a wounded student. Another teacher—playing a student—stepped in and took over.
After the scenario ended, the leader laughed. “I guess it’s good that you have a student trained in basic medical procedures,” he said.
The joke being that we had momentarily forgotten our roles.
The scenarios lasted for nearly two hours. In none of the hypothetical situations did a student “die,” at least not explicitly. We imagined Pete as the proverbial student “Johnny,” the one we loved but knew was troubled, and we had to remember that our love for Johnny couldn’t outweigh who he really was, who he had been primed to become all along: a school shooter. What had primed him to be one? We didn’t ever talk about that.
But throughout the scenarios, Pete-as-Johnny remained in the battleground of the hallways, faceless. I wondered if other teachers had a student in mind. I didn’t. I didn’t think any of my students would ever do that. Does every teacher think that way? But I also knew that our school sat off the highway, and we often went on lockdown when police chases passed by our campus. I didn’t rule out the possibility of an intruder.
I often became irritated with my students when one would go to the bathroom and unlock our classroom door so that they didn’t need to be let in again. One day a student asked me why I got so annoyed by that.
“Because,” I said, “the locked door is our first line of defense if we go on lockdown.”
Another student chuckled. “You know Black kids don’t shoot up schools, right?”
“I don’t think any of you would,” I said, backtracking, realizing my students would assume I’m profiling them rather than thinking of strangers. “But not every shooter has been from the school they attack.”
“Don’t worry,” the student said. “We’re good.”
At the training, a teacher asked, “What if it’s actually Mary knocking on the door, and we didn’t answer?” I realized that most of the teachers here had students who were under twelve.
“Are you willing to risk that it’s Mary and not Johnny?” a leader responded. “Or maybe you don’t know Mary as well as you thought you did?”
Each time someone knocked on the door, the teacher in the scenario did not answer, not for Mary or Johnny or anyone. Never did the knocker enter the room, even when Pete fired shots that would presumably shatter the door’s window or shoot the handle off. Eventually, the knock at the door stopped after several attempts, either raps or gunshots. The scenario ended, and everyone applauded. The knock at the door was met with refusal of entry. The worst did not come to pass.
No one pointed out what I was sure was obvious: These doors were not bulletproof. We were being trained for the best-case scenario. The gunman knocked, was denied entry, and moved on. How lucky we all were. We agreed to deny other possibilities.
Hadn’t I learned something? Fine. I knew how to use what was in my classroom as a shield. I knew when to take cover. I more or less knew how to treat a life-threatening wound.
But I felt no gratitude for being forced to learn about this, and from these men no less. The men who denounce the violence they are otherwise proponents of. The cyclical cruelty of their game: put guns in the hands of children, then become suspicious of them. Profile Black and Latino students, then deny that there is a school shooter profile who resembles white boys. Glorify guns, then demonize the ones who use them for the violence these men claim not to sanction. Am I confusing situational awareness with speculation again? Fine then. I’m confused. Please tell me where to point the finger so that my students and I can survive.
At the close of the day, our district liaison brought us back into the school gym where we were given time for final questions. Then the liaison asked us to thank the men. The room applauded.
The men thanked us for what we were doing in our classrooms every day, and for caring about our students’ safety, returning our applause.
A feedback loop of applause encircled the room. I didn’t join in. It didn’t matter. I was already looking for the exit, thinking about how to use my training as a teacher to speak a different world into existence.
***
Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen
