Humility

When I first came into teaching, my district had a staff developer named Jackie who preached humility to us as educators. Teachers, she said, cannot guarantee results. Our job is about making outcomes more likely.

(and that's true of other professions too)

Any discussion of school safety leads to promises individuals can't keep. Teaching isn't an exact science, nor is school safety. The grownups at schools follow a bewildering number of protocols to ensure the safety of students, and those grownups get it right more than 99% of the time.

The Columbine tragedy took place near the end of my first year of teaching. Every year of my career has been marked by effots to make schools safer. We have turned them into virtual fortresses.

And, still, tragedy occurs.

So now the gun-rights zealots, in an attempt to impose their own Sharia law of gun-toting citizenship, want teachers to be armed. It's such a senseless, insenstive, and deadly idea, I don't know how to respond to it thoughtfully. I'll simply point out that it won't guarantee that there will never be another school shooting, it won't guarantee another death due to firearms in the schoolhouse.

The Columbine tragedy occurred 19 years ago this spring. Schools have changed many protocols. A whole generation of students have moved through the K-12 pipeline learning how to perform a variety of drills. But the broader community has lacked the will to do anything that will make it less likely there are victims of gun violence at schools.

Like pass a law . . . one law . . . to make it harder for a bad guy to get a gun.