By Ashley Lodato
The week before Christmas I was at the elementary school, hanging some student art in the hallway. As I filled a bulletin board with second-grade art, a group of first-graders walked by.
“Look at what those kids made!” one girl exclaimed, pointing at the art I was displaying.
“Whoa!” responded her peers in unison.
I told the students that they would get to participate in this same art project when they were in second grade, as it has been a second-grade tradition for many years.
“Oh I can’t wait!” said the girl, and turning to her friends with the perspective of someone 4 months into her first grade year, she said, “We’re almost in second grade now, so we almost get to do THAT.”
At this point another boy came up and joined the group and the girl asked him, “Are you in second grade?”
“No,” he replied, “I’m from Texas.”
Overheard snippets of conversation like this highlight the innocence of childhood — as it should be.
That same morning the school held a lockdown drill. An announcement was made over the loudspeaker, and those of us in the hallways had to scurry into a classroom to enter lockdown with the students. The drill was conducted quickly, without panic or drama. But still, as I lay on the carpet in the corner of a darkened, locked classroom, listening to the teacher speak quietly and reassuringly to the students while someone rattled the doorknob from the hallway, it wasn’t hard to imagine what a real lockdown might be like.
Coincidentally, earlier that week I had listened to a radio interview with some of the teachers from Parkland, Florida, who had corralled students into their classrooms during the Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School, so many mass shootings ago. Teachers described pulling as many as 60 students into supply closets in their classrooms, breaking locked-door protocol but saving dozens of lives. They described following live video feeds of the shooting on social media, watching peers and colleagues die, as they, the lucky ones, crouched in a crowded storeroom.
And they described the eerie silence, once the sounds of gunfire and running footsteps ceased. Uncertainty about when it was OK to unlock the door — was that indeed the police yelling “Police, open up!” or was it a shooter? — mingled with the numb realization that many of their friends and coworkers had not made it into the sanctuary of a secured room.
I thought about all this as I lay on the floor with the cheerful little 7-year-olds in a second-grade classroom at Methow Valley Elementary: a place that most of us would like to believe is one of the safest places on earth.
Sobering thoughts, perhaps, for heading into a new year. But as we reflect on the year past and the years ahead, it never hurts to remind ourselves how precarious is our existence on this planet, and to take nothing for granted.
