By Gabby Dunn

Students of different ages all around the country know exactly how to act when the sirens call. Put down everything, turn off the lights, shut the blinds, lock the door, and get out of sight. For many, these actions are a practice, but for some, completing these tasks could be the difference between life and death. 

Eight years ago, 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 27 people in Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School. One of the most devastating in a tragically long list of school shootings over the last 25 years, Sandy Hook changed the way that both students and parents all around the country felt about sending their small child off to school, not knowing whether today would bring about the same fate as that of those 20 first graders. 

That terrible day, December 14th, 2012, I walked into my 7th-grade homeroom classroom, as I did every morning, at Haddam Killingworth Middle School in Killingworth, Connecticut, 40 miles from Newtown, where my family lived before moving to Richmond in 2016. I sat at my desk, looked at the day’s schedule, talked with my other classmates, then stood up and left for English class. During our discussion about To Kill a Mockingbird, I heard the sirens and put down all of my materials. My classmates and I moved into the corner as our teacher, with a confused and fearful look on her face, locked the doors, shut the blinds, and told us to quiet down. 

Ignorant about what was transpiring, my classmates and I made jokes and whispered to each other about trivial middle school tasks and drama. It wasn’t until I left school that day that my mom had told me about the tragedy that had actually occurred a few towns over. Days passed, and all I saw on every news show and newspaper were photos of those lost, and a terrifying photograph of Lanza, whose empty and grim eyes stared through the screen. 

As an eleven-year-old girl attending a middle school thirty minutes away from where this tragedy happened, I had never been exposed to such violent and graphic news. When I saw those headlines, it was the first time that I paid any attention to the news at all. The next time I went to school, the only thing I thought about was what could come next. Could this happen to my school? What would I do? I began mapping out exactly what I would do in each scenario. How would I escape from my second story math classroom? Where would I go during assembly? 

Even today, I find myself doing the same thing. When I’m sitting in an assembly in Oates Theater, I wonder: What would I do? When the Lockdown alarm sounds and the announcement is made, I flinch, and tears pool up in my eyes. Two years ago, at Collegiate, we had a Lockdown drill in the morning, and then the alarm sounded again unexpectedly later in the day. I was in Spanish class. I grabbed my phone and ran to sit against the wall in P124, Upper School Spanish teacher Elsie Bustamante’s classroom. Every emotion from 7th grade came flooding back. All of the students sat up against the walls in the dark and worried about what was going on outside the doors, in the hallway. Thankfully, my classmates and I left the room safe and alive, but the minute I did I picked up my phone and called my mom and texted my sister and my friends to see if they were all safe and to tell them that I love them. The next day, I was scared to walk back through the front doors of the school, worried that next time it might not be a false alarm. 

Parents around the country have changed the way that they look at sending their children off to school. I sat down with my own mom, Susanne Dunn, and asked her about how she felt when it came time to send my sister and me back to school after Sandy Hook. She said, “I didn’t want to say goodbye.” 

“Every time I would get mad at you girls before I had to send you off to school, I immediately thought of how parents could lose their children at any moment and tried to make you as happy as you could be before I said goodbye.” She remembers constantly seeing the Newtown victims’ faces all over every news channel and website for months after the tragedy, and she shared the same fear after seeing the eyes of the shooter, Lanza, on television and the internet. 

I can only imagine the difficulty my mother faced preparing to send three children off to two different Connecticut schools after Sandy Hook. My brother, Jack Dunn, was still in kindergarten at the time, at Killingworth Elementary School, located about ten minutes from my middle school.

On December 14th, 2012, teachers at Sandy Hook did their best to protect their students when their lockdown wasn’t just a drill. According to Sandy Hook 1st grader Ella Seaver, “My teacher read us books, talked to us, and played a little game.” The students in her classroom, having heard the gunshots, were told to get into their cubbies. All around the school, teachers were instructing their children to do the same. 

Yvonne Cech, a teacher at Sandy Hook, was in the library with her class at the time that the gunshots rang out. She said she didn’t know what the noises were at first, because she had never actually heard a gunshot in person. After she had distinguished what the noise was, she had to walk outside the library into the hallway in order to lock the doors, and her key didn’t work on one of the entrances, so she barricaded whatever she could in front of the doorway. After locking everyone inside the library, she told the students to, “crawl on the floor and get into the closet.” She explained that they were going to play “a quiet game,” and that their class was in a challenge to find the best hiding spot. In an interview with Now This News, she said they were the last class to be found because they were hidden so well. 

Co-founder of the nonprofit organization Sandy Hook Promise, Mark Barden lost his son Daniel in the shooting, and in an interview five years after the tragedy, he told Now This News, “five years later, I can’t wrap my head around the fact that my little Daniel is gone… and he’s gone because of somebody else’s choice.” The aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting has left victims and survivors feeling empty and nervous. Cech explained her feelings about life after the tragedy: “I couldn’t walk into a store anymore without thinking, where are the exits and where is a good place to hide.” She said that now children that went through that experience duck and cover whenever so much as a book hits the floor in the library or a door slams down the hallway. 

Other places, not only Connecticut, were deeply affected by the loss of those 20 students and six teachers. After the shooting, President Barack Obama said, “Not a parent in America doesn’t feel an overwhelming sense of grief.”

Out of this terrible tragedy came something positive, when dedicated parents from Newtown created Sandy Hook Promise. Founded and run by many of the parents who lost their children, the organization is dedicated to preventing something like Sandy Hook from happening again. According to their website, their goal is to “to honor all victims of gun violence by turning our tragedy into a moment of transformation by providing programs and practices that protect children and prevent the senseless, tragic loss of life.” Parents like Barden have created things like public service announcements and commercials to spread awareness, as well as National Youth Violence Prevention Week, which is practiced in schools all around the country. 

After 2012, Haddam Killingworth Middle School implemented many mental health and school shooting awareness programs. They specifically focused on the story of a young student from the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. Her parents vowed to make every student feel welcome at schools, since they lost their daughter to two gunmen in that notorious tragedy. Rachel’s Challenge, created to help prevent bullying and future school shootings by the parents of Columbine victim Rachel Joy Scott, broadcast their videos in thousands of schools around the country, and speakers followed to help pass along her message about acceptance. My school brought Rachel’s mother to our campus to share things about Rachel and what she believed before she was killed. 

The thing that I remember the most from Rachel’s powerful story were the two hands she drew on the back of her dresser in her room. Scott wrote, inside the hands, “ These hands belong to Rachel Joy Scott and will someday touch millions of people’s hearts.”  She said things at a young age like, “I know I’m going to die young,” and “If I have to sacrifice everything, I will.” Students around her often didn’t know how to react to her gruesome and random ideas, but after the Columbine shooting, her parents realized what Scott truly longed for. At my school, her mother shared her message through one of her quotes, where she told the world, in her journal, “I have a theory that if one person can go out of their way to show compassion, then it will start a chain reaction of the same.”

After watching many videos about Scott and understanding what her parents wanted people to learn from her death, I thought about how I can play a part in preventing violence in my own school, and how I can personally make the students in my community feel about themselves. In a community like Collegiate, we need to make an effort to make sure students’ mental health is a priority. 

Sadly, school shootings have continued all over the country, like the tragedy in Parkland, Florida at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14, 2018. Students all around the country reacted strongly to it, even at Collegiate. On Wednesday, March 14, 2018, at 10 a.m., a national high school walkout was implemented by students. Collegiate’s event, led by Hayley Kell (‘18) and Tyler Tunstall (‘18), saw over 220 collegiate students leaving their classes and participating in group discussions in front of Pitt Hall. Since then, student activism has not only grown at Collegiate, but at other schools all around the country. 

Though actions have been taken by many states around the country to prevent school violence, school shootings are sadly still a part of America in the 21st century. Because of quarantine and the closure of schools around the country, this March was actually the first March since 2002 where there hadn’t been a school shooting. 

Featured image credit: Tim Clayton.