Broken locks
I spent seven years teaching in two of the best public high schools in the country. Both schools always appear on top-100-in-the-nation-in-this or best-in-the-state-in-that lists. Parents pay double for houses in these districts just so their children can attend these schools. Their alumni funnel through top colleges on their way to high achievement, and high status.
And one year, in one of these stellar schools, I didn’t have a classroom for two months.
Technically, a room existed and was assigned to me. It was a former storage closet. I came in two weeks before the first day of school. I found stained and missing ceiling tiles, exposed wiring, and no whiteboards. My department head assured me the room would be made ready in time.
When the school year started, the room wasn’t ready.
So, I printed out signs redirecting my students to the library’s classroom. After my department chair had promised me the room would be ready, I’d gone straight to the library to book their side classroom in advance, just in case.
August turned into September. Parent Day came and went. I was told my room would be ready next week for eight straight weeks. Each week, I booked another week of an alternate space on campus for five different classes. My students and parents barely commented. We made do, at one of the best public high schools in the country.
It’s what teachers all over the country do, every single day. All of our schools, the best and the worst, have unfinished rooms. Part of being a teacher is knowing how to fix the window that never closes right or paying for a personal supply of construction paper. In my case, it meant knowing that even when you’re promised that your room will be ready you’d better reserve a backup. Everyone accepts broken masonry, missing supplies, and half functional restrooms at schools when they wouldn’t accept those conditions anywhere else.
Which goes a long way towards explaining why nobody noticed or cared too much about two broken locks at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX.
As the full scope of failure becomes clear in Uvalde, it is easy to be infuriated at the inaction of the police. People trained to protect Uvalde stood in the hallway for almost an hour while a gunman shot and killed fourth graders and their teachers. There should be a full investigation and the people responsible should be fired. If there are criminal or civil remedies available to the families who were shattered on May 24, they should be enforced to the fullest extent of the law. If the law doesn’t currently allow for those remedies, I will be first in line to petition lawmakers to change it.
Speaking of lawmakers, it is also easy to be incensed that decades of gridlock in Washington has thwarted common sense gun safety measures as the death toll in our schools, churches and grocery stores steadily rise. I am grateful that the Senate finally appears to be making progress on the most basic of gun safety measures, but it is enraging that even these tiny steps have taken so long. The vast majority of us agreed years ago that buying a weapon of war along with thousands of rounds of ammunition should trigger at minimum a small amount of scrutiny.
But as infuriated as I am by the ineptitude of the police and politicians, I find my heart shattered that there is not the same level of fury about the broken locks at Robb Elementary School. Those broken locks exist in every school in America. They would require such a small investment in our schools to fix. But there is no outrage for broken locks in a school.
There were at least two broken locks at Robb Elementary School. Both were known issues. One was on the door the shooter used to enter the school. The other was on the door he used to enter the classrooms where he killed 19 fourth graders and their two teachers.
It is far from incomprehensible that locks would be broken in a school. We all know teachers who make do with very little. Most of the teachers I worked with offered extra credit for tissues, because they knew the school would run out of them by October. It is accepted that teachers will include their DonorsChoose lists with their classroom expectations during the first week of school, in the hopes that parents might be able to supplement the supplies necessary to teach their children over the course of the next nine months.
The idea that schools do not have enough to function at a basic level is just standard operating procedure in a country that can always find more money for the police. We spend billions on political campaigns, but never have enough money for students, teachers and classrooms.
If we can’t agree on much of anything regarding policing, politics or gun safety in this country, maybe we could start with committing to give schools the resources they need to fix broken locks.
