So, as many of you know, last Friday a thing happened at my school. Now the question becomes, What Happens Next?
First, the shooter has been arrested. He was a former student. The students who joined him in the altercation are no longer students at the school. The shooter only fired once. It hit one student in the arm, then the bullet went through the arm and into the leg of another student. They are in quite stable condition. So everyone involved has been identified and is being dealt with.
As for me, I spent over an hour on Monday speaking to one of the district psychologists and I feel a lot better over the things I was feeling when I wrote the diary. I know that’s a remarkably brief summary of my feelings, but the talk really did help. We talked about all the different guilt feelings I had, especially about the reminder I got from my immediate supervisor about doing my contract day and what could have happened if they had to account for the faculty and staff. But, the therapist pointed out that this is a lesson learned, and all that guilt is now at my usual level when I get chastised by administration for something. But THAT guilt I deal with on a regular basis because it ties into my voices. And my voices usually lie to me all the time.
Now what about the students, you ask? Join me below the jump.
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First of all, Monday was made an asynchronous eLearning day for all secondary students. This means that teachers post assignments, but do not hold meets, but are still available if there are questions. The superintendent then met with all of us, plus he was on a private live stream so teachers around the district could listen in. He gave us the exact facts of everything that happened. Which is important, because there are a whole lot of rumors out on social media. He also discussed possible next steps for security. He then took feedback from the staff in a spirited session. And I mean spirited. Some tempers became a little warm. The superintendent was talking about trying to build relationships with the students to help them feel safe and loved. One veteran teacher chimed back with something like “a lot of these kids are irredeemable so why bother”, to which the superintendent replied with something like “if you don’t think building relationships with our students can help them then you should resign”. So, yeah. Warm tempers. One of the biggest issues was that as this is a brand new building, not everything is completed. For instance, we are still missing a couple hundred lockers because of shipping and manufacturing issues. Much of the technology we need has been delayed in shipping from China. Teachers do not even have their IDs to open the doors. THAT was a huge issue brought up. Because of construction, everybody was using basically one door. And until very recently, it had to have a little prop open. Obviously that has changed, and if you don’t have your ID, you have to walk to the main office, which is right next to the demolition zone for the old school.
So—it was decided that the secondary students in the district would be in asynchronous eLearning for the week, and beginning after Labor Day one grade will come into the building and have things taken care of that should have been taken care of early. So it might look like Seniors on Tuesday, Juniors Wednesday, and so forth. The other grades will have asynchronous eLearning, or some form of eLearning. Students will get chromebooks, get their IDs made, and so forth. Half the day will be doing those things, and then the students will go to each teacher for a half hour class. And temporarily we will be wanding, but we are working on a non invasive system that works with our cameras so that if someone brings in heavy metal like a gun, it will flag it and we can use the cameras to identify who did it. That system is way faster than wanding or metal detectors. Update: We just learned yesterday that every student will be bag checked next week.
So the students will be back for classes on Tuesday in the way I described above. This will be for us the first time we’ll be seeing them since it happened. We will have one grade a day while the other three are at home doing eLearning. I know I’m not doing much teaching next week. The elephant in the room needs to be dealt with. I’m hoping what needs to be said by both me and the kiddos gets to be said, and I hope I can help them start to feel safe again.
I know I’m rambling, but there’s a lot of stuff happening this next two weeks. So on to Tops!
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