Lessons We Learn

It's not often that after a day of professional development that I feel incensed. Captivated? Sometimes. Bored? Often. Motivated? Frequently. Not this past Friday. Incensed. 

I am used to riding the rollercoaster of whole language to phonics and back again. The same can be said for math facts versus problem solving. It's not important to pick a side. Teach it all and you'll be fine no matter what the statistics on the presenter's PowerPoint say. But we weren't gathered together to discuss teaching strategies. We were there to talk about survival. 

The Oakland Unified School District chose to spend what we can only assume was a fair chunk of change to sit all of its teachers and administrators down in front of Zoom presentation from Jeff Solomon about crisis management. 

Not coping mechanisms for getting through a tough day, or dealing with a room full of sugar crazed children. We were there to hear tips on how to survive an armed assault on our school. "Let's face it," our presenter Jeff Solomon said early in his presentation, “The next mass shooting is just around the corner."

For the next three hours, we were treated to potentially triggering videos of other mass shootings from the past several years and reminded how we could all do better. "Don't just sit there. Don't be a deer in the headlights." Jeff even included a slide of an actual deer in actual headlights to illustrate his point. He encouraged us all to keep our doors locked and our windows covered to obscure what we were led to understand was the inevitable appearance of a gun-toting loon. The numbers he quoted came from a number of different sources, but the bottom line was that we needed to be as prepared for this eventuality as we are for a fire or an earthquake.

Which was about the time that my frustration peaked. I sat still while he insisted that the shooter in the 2014 shooting in San Bernadino "started the incel movement," and how it was the command staff that was to blame for the slow response by officers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. I work at a school that has drills for fire, earthquake and lockdowns.

I also work at a school where seventy percent of our students are reading below grade level. That feels more like an emergency than the potential of becoming yet another statistic. Coming from the guy who makes a feature out of each new slice of gun violence this may seem somewhat contradictory.

But it isn't.

It's horrible that my job now involves a seminar about "target hardening" and acceptable losses. There were at least three points during Mister Solomon's show that he suggested that whatever we do, there might not be a way to save all the kids. So much for No Child Left Behind.

Then there were the examples he used. He referenced Officer Tackleberry from the Police Academy movies as a poor choice for a school security officer. Later, he told us all that he wanted us to be more aware of our surroundings, like Jason Bourne. The examples he gave us were Hollywood. The video he shared was straight from the news.

And somewhere, out there, a crazy person was just waiting for us to leave our door propped open. For the kid who didn't get breakfast that morning and then needed to go to the bathroom while the rest of the class got busy with the lesson for the day: Barricading the door.