I posted these thoughts to my personal FB page earlier (and sadly set the post to private b/c I was scared someone from district would see it).

Every single year since I started my career I’ve walked through campus and contemplated the various places I’d try to hide students during a shooting, and what I would try to do to stop someone. I’ve realized I would be killed in the process should that happen, because there is no way in hell I would do less than everything in my power to keep them alive. But I also know I wouldn’t stand a chance.

Never, when I got into education, did I think these would be the routine contemplations of my back to school process. And yet, it is now so engrained in me that I do it without really stopping to consider the abhorrence of such a reality.

Tell me, how can anyone justify that this is the reality of every school employee in this nation, and we just accept it. Explain to me how a person’s “right” to own semi automatic weapons is an acceptable trade for this reality. Explain to me how my being asked to sacrifice my life to save your children, should this happen at my school, is acceptable and has become a commonly “normalized” reality.

This is a fact educators and school staff face Every. Single. Day., and yet again more teachers lost their lives this week doing exactly that. They were forced to trade their lives for the repeated acceptance that their lives meant less than the “rights” of others to own machines designed specifically to kill.

Shame on you, America.