A letter to the ANCS school family

Dear ANCS school family,

The 1998-99 school year was my first year working in a school.  I taught several history classes to freshmen and sophomores at a high school in Chicago.  That year, when I spent hours creating my first lesson and unit plans, helped to coach the track team, and worked with an incredibly diverse group of students, was filled with many memorable moments.  But the day that still stands out the most from that school year was April 21, the day after the mass shooting that took place at Columbine High School in Colorado.  We’d been asked by the school’s principal to arrive early that morning so we could discuss whether and how to talk with students about what had happened.  I remember greeting my first class of the day and quickly becoming frozen with fear about how I was going to address what students were feeling.  And I remember being surprised by the reaction of many of my students.  The school drew from neighborhoods in Chicago that were predominantly recent immigrants to the United States, many from places where violence was a way of life, like Bosnia, Haiti, and Central America.  For many of the students from these places, bloodshed was not new to them; many of their families had come to the U.S. to escape it.  But the fact that students had gone into their own school to kill classmates was shocking to them, not only because of the depravity of the event but because, as one student said, “I thought America was different”.

Sadly, he was right, as many more school shootings since Columbine have shown, including one just two weeks ago in Parkland, Florida.  America is different in that no other country in the world sees the sort of mass shootings in schools at the rate we do.  Indeed, gun violence in the United States far surpasses any other nation with comparable socioeconomic indicators.  Perhaps that is why there is growing anger and frustration with the continued inability of our elected leaders and our country as a whole to take meaningful steps to curb this sort of violence, especially when it affects our young people.  Tossing out suggestions like arming teachers to ward off a shooter (an absolutely terrible idea that has no evidence to support it and something I can assure you would never come to pass at ANCS) contribute to a sense that there is not a willingness to address the root causes of our incredibly high rate of gun violence.

To that end, there is, as I imagine you have heard, a national school walkout being coordinated on Wednesday, March 14 to draw attention to the issue of gun violence and safety in our schools and to urge elected leaders to take action to address it.  At ANCS, we feel it is important to offer our students, teachers/staff, and families the opportunity to engage in some way with this event given how significant an issue this is to students not only at ANCS but around the country.  Therefore, at 10 AM on March 14 each campus will offer about 20 minutes of age-appropriate, structured activities to reflect on what we can do to help our country be a place where students can expect to be safe in their schools.  At the elementary campus, the focus will not specifically be on this most recent incident or on gun violence but instead will center generally on the ways students can make our schools safe for all, and these discussions will take place with their classroom teachers.  At the middle campus, a group of student leaders will work with teachers and staff advisors to plan the activity there.  Dr. Goodgame will follow up soon with middle campus families with more details.

Teachers and staff will guide this time at each campus on March 14th, and parents and caregivers are welcome to join us at both campuses if you would like.  If you have questions about what will be happening at each campus, please feel free to contact our principals: Lara Zelski at the elementary campus (lzelski@atlncs.org; 404-624-6226) or Cathey Goodgame at the middle campus (cgoodgame@atlncs.org; 678-904-0051).  

If your student is aware of the recent shooting in Florida and mentions it at home, you may find it helpful to review this guidance from the National Association of School Psychologists about how to handle that conversation.  And, of course, please feel free to reach out to our school counselors as a resource.

In the wake these kinds of tragic events, many parents understandably want to know, “Is my student safe at school?”  Believe me, I understand and share that reaction.  My own son is a student at ANCS, and I care deeply about his safety along with being concerned about the safety of all of the other students, teachers, and staff here at ANCS.  So I will tell you that we have security measures in place to monitor who comes into our buildings and keep them secure and we practice different emergency drills regularly.  But, above and beyond those steps, as our middle campus advisory coordinator, Jennifer Dickie, wrote in an email to middle campus teachers after the school shooting in Parkland, “Keeping our school safe is about our practice of drills but it is also about how we treat each other and how we care for each other.  When students notice a friend or someone being left out, being hurt, or feeling down, it is really important to tell an adult so we can help that student find the help they need.  Students may feel reassured if they know they are part of the solution to keeping school safe.”  Every day at ANCS, we strive to create a community–a “school family”–where students are known well, where attention is given to promoting kindness and to teaching the skills of self-regulation, and where the social-emotional needs of students are supported as much as the academic ones.  These everyday actions are just as important–perhaps even more important–than the drills we run through.

So, yes, we try to do all we can to ensure students can be safe and joyful and learning at school.  But in a country where even the most highly-secure environments like a naval yard and an army post can be the site of indiscriminate gun violence, I think we all know that more action needs to be taken on a national level to address this critical issue.  Hopefully, March 14th will bring more attention to that need.

Sincerely,

Matt Underwood

Executive Director