In the Wake of Sandy Hook: How Do We Trust Our Schools?
Just under a year ago, my husband, Dan, and I started looking at preschools for our three-year-old son. We visited several to compare and contrast. Although we were concerned with cost (most preschools are not public), curricula, outdoor play time and the values of each program, one of our primary concern was where will our son be safest? Safety, as we saw it, was two-fold: we wanted him to be emotionally cared for in an environment that honored his individuality and interests; and we needed to know that he would be physically safe. So during the preschool gauntlet of “meet and greets” and information sessions, we asked administrators a series of questions. One of those questions was simply this: What is your school’s plan if someone were to come in here with a gun? How would you protect our child? At the time, we could tell just from the taken-aback expressions that people—both fellow parents as well as school officials--thought we were crazy. In the wake of Sandy Hook, I’m not sure we were.
I am, admittedly, in many respects, a worst-case-scenario person. Not that I think the worst case will always happen, but I believe it’s smartest to look at the wide range of possibilities rather than blindly sally forth, totally clueless. Dan, by nature, is milder than I am. He likes to joke that when I start worrying about the dangers of the world, I can sound a bit like Rain Man on repeat. So he often tries to counter my worries with alternative perspectives. In this way, between the two of us, we can look at an issue from a variety of angles and cover a lot of ground. This does not mean, of course, that, after exhaustively talking something through, we always make the best decisions. Far from it. We make our fair share of mistakes. In fact, sometimes we choose to acknowledge a risk and then keep going. Being a parent, and just plain being in the world, requires a little bit of trust in entropy, after all.
And so, last spring, when preschool acceptances were coming in, Dan got a phone call from the director of one of the schools. “We’ve accepted your son,” the director said, “but we’re not sure about you and Caitlin. We want to meet with you to address some of your questions and make sure we can work together.”
Although I felt a bit like I was being sent to the principal’s office, I went (Dan could not make it). In the meeting with the director, his deputy and the head preschool teacher, the deputy mentioned that they’d never before been asked these kinds of questions about safety. They struggled to tell me what their plan would be if an armed gunman were to enter the school; it became clear that this was not a scenario they had ever considered in great depth, or really prepared for.
It was a hard meeting for all of us—we had to think outside of our comfort zones, and it didn’t feel good. In the end, however, they told me how much they believed in teaching peace and tolerance, how important it was for them to make the kids at their school feel confident in the world--not afraid--and how they believed their school had some natural safeguards in place because of its location off the beaten track and, more importantly, their low and loving profile in the community.
That night, Dan and I chewed over the facts versus our fears. We listed the pros and cons of each of the three schools we were considering. We discussed what was safest on an emotionally soul-fulfilling day-to-day level versus the unlikely possibility of tragedy. Was there a part of us that would have liked to send our son to pre-school inside a guarded fortress with a moat? Of course. Would that be good for him? Last year I might have written “of course not” in answer to that question. Today I’ll write, “probably not.”
In the end, Dan and I made a leap of trust into the school community that had called us in for the meeting. The fact that they were willing to talk through our fears actually made us feel safer. And we knew we had to, in a world that is increasingly violent, choose trust, peace and love over fear.
This past Monday, after a weekend full of grief over what happened in Newtown and a sleepless Sunday night, Dan and got up and did what we needed to be done for our child: Together we drove him to school. When we got there, he walked in between us, holding both our hands. This was more about Dan and me than our son because he, thankfully, due to an information blackout in our house since Friday, was blissfully ignorant. It was his snack day, and we’d packed pineapple chunks, hard-boiled eggs and a box of Matzah—he was excited to share these goodies. We walked him in, found his classmates in the assembly hall doing some kind of long-limbed hopping counting exercise, and let him loose. As we were leaving, I turned to wave one more time. I felt a bit like I do right before I jump in the ocean—a funny mixture of conjuring up courage to take the leap and the internal acknowledgment that there will be a moment or two of free-fall, when I will not have control.
But when I looked back, what I saw was my child’s happy face surrounded by the happy, loving faces of his peers and teachers. Dan and I smiled at each other and kept walking out of the school doors to our lives, feeling blessed that we were lucky enough to be here, together, for one more morning on our messy, complicated earth.
Caitlin Shetterly is the author of the memoir Made for You and Me: Going West, Going Broke, Finding Home. She lives in Maine.
