Emporia, Kansas

             Emporia Kansas has a memorial to fallen teachers on its campus. It is a replica of a one room schoolhouse set on a knoll, with a pair of black granite plinths carved with names. It is on the edge of town; the highway purrs in the distance beside the football fields on one side, on the other is an empty parking lot.  It was a still peaceful evening in late June when we visited. School was not in session. There are 113 names on the two slabs, 113 adults who died in school,  protecting their children they were hired to keep safe—and most of them have been added in the years since I began teaching.  We studied them—there was a clump of deaths in Texas back in the 1930s—but the rest of the names were familiar, even though we had forgotten—how can you forget?—a few. Springfield. Columbine.  Roseburg. Sandy Hook.         

  

I was a fairly new teacher when Kip Kinkel walked into a high school in Springfield Oregon, about fifty miles south of here.  The idea that a student would walk into a middle class suburban school and begin shooting was unfathomable. There had been shootings Near schools before, of course, but not At school. It was different. Not a pattern. After Columbine happened, one of my ninth grade girls, given to drama, was afraid to walk across the quad to the counseling office. “What if a shooter came in?” she asked. I assured her that she would be fine and sent her on her way. Schools began to search for patterns, to interview kids who wore trench coats and failed English class, who were not engaged. The biggest change, though, was that kids stopped wearing trench coats. No positive changes in the gun laws. No increase in mental health screenings.  Then the Two Towers came down and our attention shifted elsewhere.

  

              I have been teaching for twenty years now. I have distinct memories of at least two students who terrified me because there was nothing behind their eyes. They never did anything in my class to raise suspicions, but I watched them closely anyways.  We all know these kids, like we know the ones who shine so brightly in our classrooms.  And the unfathomable is now….commonplace. Another shooting? We say. Something has got to change. But nothing does.  This behavior is now normal. And my confidence that we will be fine, that we are safe at school—or in any big crowd of people-- has slipped away. I don’t think I would send a young girl worried about a shooter out into the building these days. I’d let her stay where she felt safe, at least for a little while.  Because I know, now, that it is just a matter of time. It could happen here.  And we would just be more names on the plinth.