Like most of us, I have been grappling with the news of the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, since last Friday. I learned about the massacre as I was literally running from a meeting, in which my phone had been muted, to a class where a colleague and I were helping our students review for their final exam. I read the text from my wife just as I saw the ashen look on the face of one of our administrators; I knew this was one of those times where everything changes and there’s no going back to the way things were before. I spoke with the juniors and seniors in the class and explained that sometimes the inexplicable happens, and we adults don’t have easy answers to their eminently sensible and emotionally raw questions.
Having experienced the aftermath of school shootings since Columbine, I knew that one of our first priorities was to communicate with parents to let them know what was occurring at school. I immediately wrote a letter, which we sent out to our parents before they came to pick up their children, citing a list of resources published by the National Association of Independent Schools from a previous school shooting. It’s a sad realization that there’s now a procedure for handling such situations, but these are processes that all too many precedents have shown us do work.
However, none of our practiced procedures can eliminate the shock we experience every time another killing spree occurs. Like the events in Aurora, Colorado, this past summer, another school shooting pulls the rug out from us as we are faced with the cold reality that there may be nowhere we can guarantee our children’s safety.
Many years ago after the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) shooting, I read a column by Anna Quindlen, linked here, describing the perfectly natural human tendency to isolate ourselves from a tragedy by finding ways to say that such an event could never happen to us. We tell ourselves “I don’t live there” or “I don’t work there” as a way to make ourselves feel safe. The truly frightening aspect of the LIRR shooting was that we could not distance ourselves from that event – any of us could have been on that commuter train. With that understanding, our false sense of security was gone once and for all. This is just as true when other people’s children, who could easily be our kids, are killed in a movie theater or at school. They are no longer someone else’s children -- they are ours.
So, what do we tell our children in the aftermath of events like these? I spoke at our morning meetings this past Monday, and I shared these simple reminders with our students. First of all, it’s imperative to remember that Adam Lanza was one human being; each of us has the capacity to do good or evil, and what we do with that power is our decision. Hopefully, all of our students will make the good decisions to make our world a better place.
Second of all, last Friday’s shooting reaffirms that life is fragile and can end suddenly. Consequently, among our most treasured gifts are our relationships with family and friends, and we should never take them for granted. As we head out for two weeks of vacation and a great deal of time with those people, we need to tell them how much we care for and love them. I once heard someone say that we should live every day as if it were our last day on earth, for one day that will be true.
Thirdly, I told the students that sometimes in the sadness of tragic events, we don’t know what to do or what to say, but that may be the time when it’s most important to say something. I learned this many years ago when one of my siblings, who had encountered a difficult event, responded to my silence by telling me that even saying I didn’t know what to say was better than saying nothing. Saying something is hard, but it’s necessary. As a means of teaching our students that words can heal and that young people, in fact, can do something, we placed large pieces of paper around school so students could write messages of consolation to the Sandy Hook Elementary School community. As one would expect, these messages were touching. Our students are learning that we cannot take away the pain and sadness of tragedy, but we can try to console others.
None of these measures will make what happened last Friday go away, nor will it cause the suffering of the people in Newtown to cease. Nevertheless, as our society reassesses gun laws and caring for the mentally ill, maybe our students will learn that they have the ability to do good, that they need to cherish every one of their relationships, and that they all need to help take care of people who are suffering. This may not be much to take away from such a horrific event, but as educators and as parents, we must use this as a learning opportunity for our children with the hope that this will inspire them to make our world a better and safer place than it is now.
