As a teacher who has huddled in the corner of a room with kindergarten kids in a code red drill, trying to keep students occupied while not focusing on why we must be versed in this behavior, I found myself choking back tears at the news of what happened in Newtown. How unspeakable. How sick the shooter must have been to point guns at children. Just hearing that 18 Children were dead, teachers who heard the news knew it meant the shooter had entered a classroom- too early to know all the facts, but I\'m old enough to have experienced enough issues of mental illness to know that it is unmistakably a factor in this tragedy.
But what will come of this tragedy? A call for schools to increase security to keep it from happening again? Certainly not a discussion about gun control! But how about a discussion of a proactive social safety net? The common thread in all these tragic mass shootings seems to be lost young males. How many of us know one of these males? We think they are okay-but after reading the profile of one of these shooters, they seem to be so close a description to that lost child we knew.
Most modern countries have some social safety nets that join families in raising their children. Whether that help comes when a women brings her child home from the hospital or whether it comes at graduation from high school, how hard is it to design a system that can check in with all students and families to ensure they have the help they need or know how to access it should they ever need it. We need to do something real this time. Back in the early stages of my teaching career, there was a term: "end up on a tower with a rifle" that described the troubled child that you knew in your heart needed help and God forbid what would happen if they didn\'t get it. In the wake of today\'s news that idea seems some how so much less harmful, but still the idea remains and is magnified........there are children and young adults who are troubled and need our help and without that help what will happen is unthinkable but must be on all our hands. It takes a village to raise a child, and yet somehow in this rich nation, we can\'t seem to understand that simple prophecy. I say prophecy because it truly does predict what our society will become.
