School Shootings, Lockdown Drills, and a New Idea

Texas.

I woke up this morning to news about Texas. Nineteen dead children and teachers. Again.

The conversation about these mass murders is so common that The Onion — a hilarious publication when it isn't so serious it can humble you — simply runs the same headline and story every single time it happens; in part because it's the exact same story each time and in part to create an understanding that our response is the same. The headline is: "‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

[https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-pr...]

Let's go directly to my point: I have a new idea on how to prevent this.

I am well-aware that the country is awash in weapons and more are being sold by the second. I know that there are about four-and-a-half times more gun stores in America than there are McDonald's (of which there are about 14,000 and seem to be everywhere. I know about the lobbies, the NRA and the rest of it.

I still have a new idea.

Here's why I have the idea. Before being a novelist I was a social scientist (Ph.D. in international relations) and I worked at the UN for a decade specializing in innovative and evidence-based methods of design for public policy. I came to look at participation in the design of policy in new ways; ways I think could be helpful to states, counties, schools and classrooms in preventing mass shootings.

But I'm not working as a social scientist anymore and I'm a novelist now. So a few years ago I wrote a novel (published, so far, as an Audible Original) called QUIET TIME. It was the most autobiographical work I'd yet produced, and in it I imagined a family — not too unlike mine — that moved from Geneva (where I lived for over a decade) to Marblehead, Massachusetts on the Atlantic, not far from where I was born and raised.

In the story, 15 year old Beatrice experiences her first lockdown drill. She has an out of body experience, panics, and grabs the police officer's night stick — the officer who was pretending to kill everyone — and knocks him. It's caught on video and the video went viral.

Beatrice's parents — Robert and Mkiwa — are called to the principal's office for a conversation. Beatrice was invited to the office for the first part of the talk but was then kicked out so the grown ups could speak. In the scene below, Beatrice is not going to gym, like she's supposed to, and instead finds a spot outside to spy on the conversation she's not allowed to hear.

During that conversation Mkiwa (a British/Kenyan human rights lawyer) and Robert (whose background is a bit like mine) give the principal a piece of their minds (especially Mkiwa). In that scene are ideas that America is NOT discussing about how to save our children's lives.

Why share it here? I'm doing it here first and quickly because I can. Later I'll write it up elsewhere. If you find the ideas compelling, pass them along. If you work in child protection, write me. Let's deal with this:

— Derek B. Miller
25 May, 2022
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EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL QUIET TIME, an Audible Original:


Out in the hall, while the other students were sorting themselves into classes for the next period, Beatrice made a subtle about-face and advanced straight to the exit.

Under a hot September sun, she trotted across the lawn and around the corner with her stupid backpack that she planned to replace tomorrow, assuming she was ever allowed to go shopping again.

What she needed to do this instant was find out what the adults really had planned for her. There was no way that the full impact of smashing a guy in the legs and head with a nightstick was to be remedied by writing a short story and having a chat about it. There had to be more going on, and she needed to know what it was. It was her life, after all.

That open window was the key. Beatrice counted the open windows along the outer wall to make sure she was in the right spot near Mr. Harding’s office. Once she could hear their voices, she quickly settled down with a book, low and quietly, to eavesdrop. She opened the book to a random page and held it on her knees.
The acoustics were surprisingly good once the other students had reached their classes and the passing cars were out of range. What she had not expected was how well she could see her mother reflecting off the open window.

Harding was in mid-sentence when Beatrice finally caught up with their conversation. His voice was low and direct as though he was announcing a space launch:
“… a lot of parental concern about Beatrice’s actions. I appreciate what you’re doing to rectify the situation, Mrs. Livingston, but you need to know that I’ve received numerous calls from parents who are asking about what disciplinary measures the school is planning to take given that a child assaulted a man with a weapon on school grounds during a drill designed to protect students. Even the superintendent is concerned. The optics of a child rebelling against a lockdown drill—it’s very awkward. We need them to follow directions, not to mention the matter of the assault. There is some discussion,” Harding went on, “about a need to suspend Beatrice, if only for a short time and symbolically,” he emphasized, “to reassure the community that law and order is taken seriously and that the school is working in the best interests of its students. We cannot, of course, condone violence.”

No one at home had used the word “suspended” to Beatrice. This was news. She knew what it meant.
“Thank you, Mr. Harding,” Beatrice heard her mother say.

Inside, Mkiwa picked up the metal genius puzzle Mr. Harding had left on the desk for people to fidget with while being reprimanded. Her voice, too, was calm and professional and even supportive: “I suppose I can understand why you’d need to have that conversation,” Mkiwa said with a forced chuckle, “though it’s more clear why you’ve correctly rejected it, as it obviously would have sent exactly the opposite message.”

“I don’t quite see your meaning,” Mr. Harding said.

“No?” Mkiwa said, hands working the metal rings. “Let me explain. Any public reprimand of Beatrice in this case wouldn’t have told parents that you’re protecting your most vulnerable students. It would have shown the world how the school is trying to protect itself from its most vulnerable students. Suspending Beatrice would have turned a terrified fifteen-year-old child into a symbol of danger. Talk about Orwellian? A little minority girl in a big and scary new school? An honors foreign student from ever-so-peaceful Switzerland who was being threatened with death by a huge police officer with a—what kind of gun, honey?”

“A nine-millimeter Glock, dear,” said Robert.

“Right. I’m just saying, good for you for rejecting such a dangerous and politically self-destructive idea.”

“Yes,” added Robert, stone faced. “Bravo.”

Beatrice hated her mother’s forced chuckle. It was the one she used when Lindia asked for an ice cream after brushing her teeth or when Beatrice asked if she could begin training for a solo balloon license, which—as it happens—is legal in America at the age of fourteen. (She learned that she could also get a helicopter license at seventeen, but she hadn’t brought that up yet.) Always that little chuckle as a response.

She had never heard it used in her defense though. She’d never heard it weaponized.

“I’m not sure I see it quite that way, Mrs. Livingston,” said Principal Harding. “Your daughter beat a man unconscious. He’s in the hospital. This is not a minor incident. There is concern about her state of mind and what else she might be capable of doing.”

Beatrice wasn’t sure, but it sounded to her like the principal was suggesting she might become a school shooter.

“It’s fortuitous,” said Mkiwa, keeping her cool, “that you used the word ‘protect.’ Protection is one of the three Ps we talk about when discussing children’s rights. Protection, Provision, and Participation. Beatrice, like all children in the school and the country and the world—as it happens—have a right under public international law to participation in decisions affecting them. Naturally, that participation is intended to function progressively as they grow and mature and develop. It isn’t the same to be two years old as it is to be seventeen, though both are children. It seems self-evident to me, Mr. Harding, that one domain for such participation is how they might feel and act when facing the threat of being massacred in their own school. A place where they spend more time than in their own beds.”

“Mrs. Livingston …”

“Not done. Robert and I have looked through our records—the post and emails—and we’ve not seen any opportunities available to us, let alone our children, for participation in matters pertaining to their own life and death, which—in the most literal sense—is what we’re talking about. It sounds instead like participation was institutionally and legally denied from the superintendent’s level on downward in direct contravention of every level of local, state, national, and international law. In fact, it makes me think that Beatrice and the other children were less like participants in the drill and more like victims of it. You see, Mr. Harding, too often the imperative to ‘do something’ is used as a weapon against those who demand that it be done right. Try to imagine what it must have felt like for a fifteen-year-old, hundred-and-fifteen-pound little girl from another country to find herself being threatened by a policeman with a gun. A real gun that was in his hand—or one that certainly looked real, anyway—and that he was waving around like a maniac.”

“I don’t believe that was the case, Mrs. Livingston. It’s not a fair description.”

“Does your school have a formal ‘do-no-harm’ policy in the design and planning and execution of these ALICE drills?”

“I’m sure we do,” Mr. Harding said.

“I suspect you don’t, but in any case, let’s see if this enactment meets your criterion for a safety drill that does no harm,” said Mkiwa.

Mkiwa opened her iPhone and played the video she’d prepped for this moment in the conversation.

“Bang. You’re dead. Bang, bang, bang. You’re all dead.”

“Where did you get that?” Mr. Harding asked.

“Jesus,” Mkiwa said.

“Sorry?”

Robert interjected. “I believe he pronounces it Hay-Suess. Jesus Velasquez. He’s in Beatrice’s homeroom. Kids these days and those smartphones, ya know? Got to film this, film that—no wonder Quiet Time is so popular. This one’s on Twitter and has eight thousand retweets and fourteen thousand ‘likes’ so far. Oh look, it’s going up, like a little odometer. Isn’t that fun? It creates the illusion that we’re all getting somewhere.”

Mkiwa put the video on repeat and continued to talk: “That looks threatening to me,” Mkiwa said, taking over. “It looks terrifying, not educational. It looks like he enjoys killing children. In a word, it looks harmful. I think the world will see it that way too. You say it’s trending, Robert?”

“Oh yes,” said Robert.

Mkiwa paused for effect as she touched one of the phone’s colorful icons and brought up some photos of her daughter. “Beatrice, meanwhile, is quite photogenic, don’t you think?” She opened her photos file. “Here’s one of her reading to old people at a retirement home in the Alps. So pretty and youthful and yet fragile in a way. Complexion like Alicia Keys’s. The camera loves her.”

“He’s not from Marblehead,” said Mr. Harding, turning defensive. “He’s from a consulting firm. We don’t use Marblehead police for this.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize that,” said Mkiwa, pretending to admit a mistake. “Why not?”

Mr. Harding hadn’t put the answer to “why not?” into actual words before. After he did, Mkiwa made him regret it. Because Mkiwa was a lawyer, she knew the answer before she asked the question; otherwise she wouldn’t have asked it.

“We want the children to have close-knit and trusting relationships with the police here, who are very nice by the way. Making them scared of the police would rather undermine that agenda. So we use consultants.”

“So … let me make sure I understand,” said Mkiwa, the trap sprung. “The drill is designed to be so traumatic that it could rupture the trust between the children and the police and so the solution has been to outsource it rather than modify it? Wow.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“That’s exactly what you said. In this particular case, the drill was so traumatic that one especially vulnerable child—faced with a fight or flight scenario—defended herself. I am recording this conversation and your continued participation acknowledges your consent.”

Principal Harding sat back, defeated. “You’re a smart cookie, Mrs. Livingston,” he said. “I’ll grant you that.”

“I’m not a cookie, Mr. Harding. I’m a barrister of the Middle Temple and an advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children. So let’s clear our minds of talk about suspension and turn to something productive, shall we?”

Beatrice checked to see whether she was holding her book right-side up. She might not have been. She might have been grinning like a crazy person too because never in her life had she heard her mother shoot cannonballs at anyone before. It was, as people around Boston seemed to say, wicked cool.

“Luckily,” Mkiwa said, changing her tone and sounding very thoughtful and helpful and even a bit apologetic, “I’m here to help. What I suggest we do …” Beatrice heard her mother say, “is issue a statement. I took the liberty of drafting one last night. The name of the journalist at the Marblehead Reporter who wants to cover this is Alice Bentley—I love that her name is Alice, right? Coincidence? Providence? Who knows? Alice and I spoke for half an hour last night. She’s fresh out of Bryn Mawr and is working at the newspaper en route to Georgetown next year for a master’s degree—isn’t that impressive? Robert went there before Oxford. What Alice was enthralled to learn was that you were entertaining the idea of a task force to study and improve the conduct of ALICE drills so that Marblehead might serve as a thought leader on child protection. Isn’t that wonderful? There’s a lot of talent in this town, I’m sure you’ll agree, Mr. Harding. Robert, don’t you think so?”

“Lots of talent,” said Robert. “Scholars, writers, administrators, parents, scientists. And, of course, the kids themselves.”

“The kids themselves. So right, dear. I told Alice that you have this brilliant idea of using children’s participation to better design and practice lockdown and evacuation drills. Not only because they’ll work better, which they will. And not only because students will take them more seriously, which they will because they will feel pride of ownership. But here’s the really innovative part, which Robert thought of because of his work at the UN: we think that design and enactment participation by students might actually help prevent school shootings. It turns out that ninety-one percent of school shooters went to the school they targeted. That means they are already participating in the drills. For all we know, the drills are giving them the idea of becoming shooters! Either way, making these potential shooters feel more a part of their community might go some way towards making them less likely to harm others.

“Now, I’m not naive,” Mkiwa said. “This won’t necessarily work, but think of it this way: worst-case scenario, we’re still better prepared than we are now, and the best- case scenario is we’ve turned a potential active shooter into a demonstrable active participant by community building and getting teachers to listen more closely to vulnerable students. Because the best way to make people not kill other people is to make them not want to kill other people.”

“It’s too long for a bumper sticker,” Robert said, “but we can still get it on a t-shirt.”

“Alice Bentley is waiting for your call. We’re all ready for your thought-leadership, Mr. Harding. The baton is yours.”

“Let’s knock ’em dead,” Robert said.

Mkiwa shook her head at him.

“Break a leg?”

Mkiwa placed the metal genius puzzle, solved, back on Mr. Harding’s desk.

As the two men sat silently—one dumbfounded, the other enjoying the principal’s befuddlement—Mkiwa turned her head and looked directly at Beatrice through the reflection in the window.

Beatrice—caught in the lock-eyed tractor beam of her mother and paralyzed by her Medusa-like stare—was too shocked to make any sense of Mr. Harding’s reply when it actually came, but whatever he said had been brief because soon chairs were being squeaked across the floor and good-byes uttered.

Mkiwa was the first to leave the room. Robert turned back to a silent Mr. Harding and said: “There is no shame in surrender. She’ll have you coming out of this looking great. I saw her do that with South Sudan once. It was very terrifying, but impressive.”