Looking For Answers

 There is no such thing as a news vacuum when it comes to school shootings when you are a teacher. It doesn't matter where it happens. Moments after the first reports, teachers know. Whether it is news alerts shared in the staff room or whispers on the playground just before students are picked up on the playground. We know. 

This was experienced even more intensely on the day gunfire broke out in front of a school here in Oakland. Meeting for professional development less than an hour after the events of this past Wednesday left us all in a state of shock. Which did not keep us from discussing the fragments of information that had made their way to us. We shared what we had heard. What we knew. What connected us to it. 

And what we made up. 

There was a competition for who knew the most. Who had the latest. "Well, I heard..."

But ultimately we returned to the heart of the problem for all of us educators: how can we keep this from happening again. At our school. That was where the conversation stalled, after we had all laid out our fears. How could we stop a carload of teenagers from unloading their weapons in front of our school? The tragic reality is that we can't. We can prepare our response. We can imagine scenarios. We can practice drills that we hope will keep our kids safe. But way down deep inside, we don't talk about the part where we don't want to know any of the shooters or the victims. 

That's the problem with what is essentially random acts of violence. You don't anticipate them. As our country continues to load up on guns, it becomes more possible for those weapons to be used to settle what has become a life or death issue. The boys who shot at students outside Rusdale Newcomer high school were most likely seeking revenge for some perceived slight based on gang affiliation. Not the kind of thing that teachers spend much time thinking about as they attempt to prepare their kids for graduating. If they do, they don't understand it. Not like those boys do. 

Some will say that Oakland got rid of police in schools, but didn't bother to get rid of gangs. Not unfair, but certainly short-sighted in the long run. Meanwhile, in Washington, the House of Representatives passed a bill to address mental health concerns among students, families and educators aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. There were two hundred five votes against the bill. They were all Republicans. The same party that has insisted for a very long time that the plague of school shootings is not based on the availability of guns, but rather the lack of mental health services. 

Now it's time for us in Oakland to pick up the pieces and get back to work. Because that's what we do. And hope that it doesn't happen again.