School Safety - Can schools ever be safe?

 Safety in schools is extremely important in order to keep the students and staff inside it healthy and ... alive. There has been a website created by the federal government to provide schools and districts with actionable recommendations to create a safe, supportive learning environment where students can thrive and grow. Whether it be bullying, cybersecurity, emergency planning, public health, mental health, or  targeted violence, this website covers them all. The two biggest threats to students in the past few years have been infectious diseases, the COVID-19 pandemic, and targeted violence (gun violence). 

For me, I have been in situations in a K-12 school where both of these situations affected me directly.

Red school with green trees outside, 
blue background with white clouds

The beginning of my junior year of high school, my school was placed into a hard lockdown for hours. I had people texting me from other classrooms, from outside the school, and even within the class that I was in asking me if I was okay and what was going on. Rumors were being spread throughout that there was someone outside firing a gun on our baseball field, someone firing on our football field, that our school police officer had heard shots fired and put us immediately on a hard lockdown. Eventually, after hours of being locked away and the whole sheriff's department showing up at our school, they had determined that it was the air conditioner that had popped and made this noise. Regardless of what it was, I could not have been more thankful for the officers that were at the school that day that were smart enough to put us into lockdown, because who knows what could have happened if it actually was someone outside of our school. The second semester of my junior year is when the pandemic hit and shut the whole world down. We were excited because everyone thought it would be an extra long spring break. Little did we know, we wouldn't be going back until weeks into what was supposed to be my senior year and nothing was back to "normal" after that. I never got to see my friends' smiling faces, I couldn't go to away games with the band to support my boyfriend on the football team, I was spending weeks outside of school because I had been exposed to the virus and couldn't risk exposing anyone else. The media talks about how scary school is for teachers, but they don't address how mentally exhausting it is to be scared to go to school everyday as a student. School should be a place to learn and to enjoy time with others, not to be scared for your life.