By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jan 31, 2013
at 5:30 pm
Students at a high school
in Illinois experienced a uniquely terrifying school shooting drill on
Wednesday. Instead of conducting a regular school lockdown, Cary-Grove High
School administrators simulated gunfire by shooting off blanks in the hallways
while students locked their classroom doors, pulled the curtains, and hid.
The drill, understandably, upset some parents in the area, who received a letter ahead of time telling
them what their children would be experiencing:
The simulation will take
approximately 15-20 minutes, during which time teachers will secure their
rooms, draw curtains, and keep their students from traveling throughout the
building. Please note that we will be firing blanks in
the hallway in an effort to provide our teachers and students some familiarity
with the sound of gunfire. Our school resource officer and
other members of the Cary Police Department will assist us in sweeping the
building to ensure that all students are in a secure location during the drill.
At the conclusion of the drill, we will take some time to process what occurred
and then we will return to our normal classroom routine.
I encourage you to discuss
the drill with your student both before it happens and after. These drills help our students and staff to be prepared
should a crisis occur, but it may cause some students to have an emotional
reaction.
Schools and parents have
gone to exceedingly extreme lengths, in the wake of the horrific killing of 20
children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, to come up with ways
to prepare for school gun violence. A school district in Texas is considering allowing teachers to carry
concealed weapons; parents have been purchasing bulletproof backpacks for their kids to
take to school; the South Carolina legislature is even considering making a gun training class for high schoolers;
and some parents even packed a gun for their sixth-grader to
bring to class.
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