Of School Board Meetings and Shooter Drills

I covered Tuesday night's school board meeting as usual but I could have been at a volunteer rescue squad gathering there was no much talk of "emergency management".

Last Friday there was a gun scare at a school in the next town over.  The story is that an armed security guard just off the night shift stopped in at his kid's school to see if he could find his lost jacket in the lost and found. (Only parents consider the lost and found box an option when a kid loses something. They should have known right there and then that this dad wasn't dangerous, just beleaguered by some wailing kid shouting "WHERE is my North Face?? I CAN'T find it.")

The front desk person did not let the armed father in and the schools throughout the town went into "lock-down mode". That was on Thursday.

On Friday, all of our schools were put into lock-down. I asked Kid 1 what this really meant. "Oh, it means you can't go outside," she explained. Then she told me the kids have been trained to stay out of the hallways as much as possibleduring these "shooter" drills. Cynical, jaded parent that I am, I laughed.

At the school board meeting it went from silly to surreal. Most of the first two hours was spent talking about the new security measures put in place to protect students in this town from crazed gunpersons. The board approved $105,000 in previously unbudgeted funds to hire a scarily-efficient sounding security "consultancy" with the rest of the money set aside to hire three more security guards--one for each elementary school.

The superintendent spoke reluctantly of "shooter drills" held in conjunction with the local police, emergency planning management, the updating of emergency management plans and the necessity of a uniform "lock-down" procedure across the three elementary schools.

A surprisingly short parade of nervous parents came up to speak or ask questions when it came time for the non-consent agenda items. The room was packed with newbie lurkers--parents who never attend meetings because they work in the city all day earning tons of money so their kids can attend these schools. The first parent took the district to task for not having HER kid's school in lock-down mode fast enough the day after the lock-down in the neighboring town. (No one asked why on earth we had a lockdown the day after the incident a town away) "I right away ran up to the school when I heard about the lock-down and I saw that the front door was WIDE OPEN," she chided.

The last parent asked if the guards would be armed... Oh boy. Hot potato there. Our seven member board which has one registered Republican, inhaled sharply as one. After a pause, the board president said that they would like to keep detailed information about that sort of thing to themselves.

My editor asked the same question. (What I thought but didn't say was "you have got to be freaking kidding me. Of course the guards AREN'T going to carry guns!") I know the board members well enough to know that they most likely had a nervous chuckle over that question later that night as they sipped their post-meeting cocktails. You can either laugh or you can cry, I figure.

Fortunately for us all, no one was foolish enough to get up and say "For god's sake, why are we enduring this insanity? Are we gerbils? Why are we even in a situation where we have to plan for the day when a crazed shooter breaks into the school? Are you people insane?" Fortunately, there are no foolish gerbils in our town and probably not many in other towns either.