Today was supposed to be a breakthrough day at school for my son. He’s finishing up his first week of junior kindergarten, and he told me yesterday he’d made his first new friend, who we’ll call ”Albert.”
Albert, we figured out, is the same boy who’s started each day this week in tears because he didn’t want his parents to leave him when school started. So today’s agenda consisted solely of making sure my son found Albert before the morning bell, and playing with Albert to make the morning transition a little easier.
Each day, Jack’s class has a different activity. One day it’s drama, another it’s music. On our walk to school this morning, I asked Jack what today’s activity was, and he answered, nonchalantly: “lockup practice.”
What’s ‘lockup practice’?” I asked.
“It’s where we lock the doors and close all the windows and lie on the carpet until they say we can get up,” he said, without breaking stride, as if I’d asked him what he had for lunch and he had replied “carrots.”
Jack was playing it cool, so I did too. He didn’t mention why he thought they were doing lockup (actually officially called “lockdown”) practice, or when he might need to use it, so I figured I’d leave that to the teachers. I dropped him off at the playground, he found Albert, and off they went to play on the jungle gym.
It was only after I left Jack that the reality of what had just happened began to settle in.
Jack’s been in daycare and a Montessori school for the last three years, so we’re used to security measures like locked gates, buzzers, and sign-out sheets that specify who’s allowed to pick him up. And my job means I’m often exposed to the rawest, most terrifying details of events like the Charleston and Sandy Hook shootings.
But I’d never put two and two together like this. Before this morning, my biggest worry was that I’d accidentally send peanut butter in his lunch, or forget to pick him up from his after-school program. I was worried about bullies. Yesterday we forgot to put his water bottle in his bag. Earlier in the week he didn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to drink his juice box (because the school has a littler-free lunch policy). Until today, it had never occurred to me to be worried that someone might try to attack my son at school.
As I got further away from the school, I was overcome by a feeling of…helplessness. No more than 100 metres from the hospital where he was born, less than a kilometre from our house, Jack is in a school where you’d think he would be safe. Canada’s only had a few instances of school shootings, and they all happened at high schools. But Sandy Hook in 2012 changed everything. When 20 children and 6 adults were shot and killed in an elementary school, it was an alert that nobody is really safe anywhere.
Toronto’s had its emergency response program in effect since at least 2005, six years after two students killed 12 pupils and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado. That means there are kids in high school today for whom some form of lockdown practice has been a reality throughout their school life. Twice a year, they practice.
Lockdown practice isn’t there in case something bad is happening nearby; there’s a “Hold and Secure” policy for that. Lockdown practice is specifically for instances where there is a “serious emergency situation where the threat is inside, on or very near to the school. A Lockdown requires that all students be kept in classrooms or other designated locations that are away from the threat.”
I’ve been frustrated of late over what feels like backwards, head-in-the-sand thinking by parents regarding the adoption of Ontario’s new sex ed curriculum. I want my child to learn things. I want him to question what he learns, and to ask questions. I want him to know about the realities of the world; I don’t need to hide him behind placards or claims that we, as parents, can teach him everything he’ll ever need to know.
So today my four-year-old is learning how to hide under a table, in case someone attacks his school with a gun. And the best I can hope is he’s listening, and helping Albert, and he’ll never have to use anything he learned today.
But even if he doesn’t, his world has changed forever. Like a lot of four-year-olds, Jack thinks an activity that happened today will happen every day. For months last year, I tried to explain why we couldn’t go to the CNE today (It’s November!). He asks if Christmas can be tomorrow. He had a salami wrap for breakfast once, and liked it, and then had one every day for the next three weeks.
Tonight, when I ask about his day, I’ll have to ask Jack how lockdown practice went. And he’ll probably ask me if they’re going to have lockdown practice every day. So I’ll answer as honestly as I can. Because the answer, in a way, is yes.
It’s a hell of a lesson to learn on the fourth day of junior kindergarten. For him, and for me.
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