TW: guns, school shooting
Last night I was mindlessly scrolling when I came across this TikTok video in which the creator was expressing their frustration at how little media attention was given to the shooting of 8 high school students in Philadelphia, as well as how quickly students were expected to return to school as normal. There was something about the creator’s description of the school response that made memories of my own high school experience come flooding back.
In the spring of 1988, more than a decade before Columbine, one of my high school classmates took a room full of students hostage using a rifle he snuck onto campus in his pant leg. I attended a large high school with over 3,000 students so lunch was served at different times. This was a year when I had early lunch, while many of my friends were stuck in fourth period. On this particular day, I was roaming the hallways, as usual, probably trying to locate someone to eat with, when teachers’ heads started popping out of doorways. “Get in! Get in!” they shouted, wildly gesticulating at anyone passing by, grabbing students, and pulling them inside. Students ran into classrooms in confusion.
I was lucky I was near Mrs. B’s class and got ushered into her classroom. I never had Mrs. B as a teacher, but she had a reputation of being cool. Plus, one of my friends was already in her classroom eating lunch. This was way before cell phones and easy Internet access so we were in the dark about what was happening. All we knew was that the sound of a gunshot had been heard. It would be hours until we finally got the full story. After what seemed like a lifetime, we were dismissed to go home.
As I walked through the crowd toward the front gates, I spotted P, a friend and member of the same service club. She was sobbing on the other side of the gate. The shooter was her boyfriend.
The next day we all went back to school. The next day. But we were told that there would be counselors available if we wanted to process what happened. The classroom was re-decorated in order to disassociate the location with the traumatic event. The next fall I would be a student in that classroom.
A High School Gunman’s Days of Rage (LA Times article)
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