‘Dad, I’m Scared’: Words from a child during a School Lockdown

-Source-Philly.com

I do not want to be like the parents I saw waiting during a lockdown Thursday at one of the Philadelphia suburbs' biggest high schools.

I do not want to imagine, as I have been imagining with increasing anxiety over the last few months, that my young boys will one day be texting me, or their dad, while barricaded against an active shooter or, as was the case at Upper Darby, a classmate spotted with a gun.

This is my parental screed: We cannot accept gun massacres and gun-toting hotheads in schools as an inevitable likelihood. Tell me you agree — all of you who are raising kids in this terrifying new American age.

We must fight. We must not let cynical politicians and lobbyists-force feed us a story line that mass killings by gunmen are part of the First World Order, and that it's our job to suck it up in the name of the Second Amendment. That the only solution is to fill the schools with gun-armed teachers as a line of defense.

This is how barbarians take down a civilization — when its people stop fighting for civilized norms.

For me, the first too-close-for-comfort moment came a few weeks ago. I got a letter in my inbox about a planned lockdown drill at my son's elementary school. I was grateful, on the one hand, to hear that his district — not Upper Darby — was proactive. But I also was speechless as I read the email from administrators.

I kept picturing my boy taking a break from learning to write lower-case letters so that he could practice hiding from a madman with an AK-47.

Then, came the Twitter blast that sent me into journalist action Thursday morning: Someone inside Upper Darby High School had a gun and the place was on lockdown.

This was my alma mater. It is a hub of humanity, a melting pot teeming with 3,700 students on Lansdowne Avenue in eastern Delaware County.

Upper Darby SD

@UpperDarbySD

Upper Darby High School is still on lockdown. Police are investigating a reported gun on campus. Please stay away from the high school at this time. No students can be released until police lift the lockdown. The district will provide an update by 9:00AM.

I rushed to the scene and parked in a cemetery across the street. There were cop cars everywhere. Parents clustered on baseball fields and in front of the Performing Arts Center that is home to the nationally known Summer Stage theater program. It was surreal. Students were locked in classrooms as police and school officials scoured video footage for a student who had been spotted with a gun. Read more