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Upon completion of a Master of Education in Guidance Counseling, I hope to be employed as a counselor in secondary education. Prior to attending Angelo State University, I earned a bachelors degree from Texas State University.

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I analyzed the national education action center, edadvoacy.nea.org The website featured a page about gun rights to reduce the number of gun owners with mental health issues. Law makers felt doing so would reduce the number of school shootings. The bill is in its very first stages of development. If this bill passes, anyone wanting to purchase a handgun will be required to submit a background check. A school shooting occurred here in Texas, and many counselors had to be readily available to handle the needs of students. Governor Abbott Even called for the hiring of more school counselors in the state of Texas.

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Bullying is something that is almost inevitable. It just happens. Physically and via the internet. However, the law requires plans to be put in place to prevent the amount of bullying that takes place. When bullying does occur, it is crucial that it is handled appropriately.

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Slide 1 Making School Safety More Important

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Slide 1 Making School Safety More Important

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School safety is complex. However, its a necessity. With the common threats to schools, it's imperative to make school safety a priority. All educators have the potential to miss possible indicators of mental health issues. It is very important educators create a plan to confirm safety in schools in all aspects.

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As the 2019 SXSW EDU conference rounded the bend into its final full day at the Austin Convention Center in Texas, attendees once again packed the fourth floor's Ballroom D for a morning keynote. Today's topic: America's Reconstruction period following the Civil War and how that era still continues to haunt the nation 150 years later on historical, sociological and political levels.

Introduced by SXSW EDU Programming Manager Julia Shatilo, the session featured a discussion of these challenges between PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger, NPR TV Critic Eric Deggans and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Learning about the truth that happened in reconstruction after the Civil War- keynote at #SXSWedu with @PBS Henry Louis Gates Jr, Eric Deggans, Paula Kerger - realizing how much we didn't know. New series on April 9 on PBS pic.twitter.com/a8XcBrA8wY
- Barbara Bray (@bbray27) March 6, 2019

The key takeaways: The history of the Reconstruction period can be seen as a cautionary tale for where the nation stands today, and that education in both history and social studies must challenge myths that persist in the lessons students are taught about previous events.

Back to reconstruction. Historically not taught well in school. Civil War always ended with Lincoln being shot, then for black people, fast forwards to MLk. Agreed. That's what I remember about US history in school. #SXSWEDU
- Sam Harris (@csamgo87) March 6, 2019

@PBS CEO Paula Kerger: "I grew up in Baltimore, and there was an intentional misrepresentation of the facts" in how Reconstruction was taught in schools. #SXSWEDU #ReconstructionPBS #keynotespeaker
- Salimah Jasani ????#SXSWEDU (@SalimahJasani) March 6, 2019

How much power have we given to the textbook companies when they directed the narrative around Reconstruction for an entire generation? How much power do we continue to give them? #SXSWEDU
- Chad Heck (@4theloveofheck) March 6, 2019

Too many kids learn that reconstruction was a large construction project in the south. It rarely resonates that it was a moral reconstruction. #SXSWEDU
- Bob Dillon (@drrobertdillon) March 6, 2019

We have the resources - how can we make school safety more proactive?

In an early afternoon session, Ontic Technology CEO and Co-Founder Luke Quanstrom led a discussion on developing more proactive school safety measures with Texas School Safety Center Director Kathy Martinez-Prather, Austin Independent School District Director of Health Services Tracy Spinner and Georgetown University adjunct professor Rich Marianos.

Within education, there's a common frustration that many of the school safety solutions proposed often involve further fortifying or arming schools, but school safety is a complex and broad topic, and there are modern technology solutions and other approaches that can prevent active shooter events.

Marianos, also a former assistant director with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said everyone from law enforcement to teachers and administrators often misses indicators of potential violence along the way. Putting together a proactive plan requires cooperation from all stakeholders, he said.

Spinner added that districts are paper-logged entities, even when it comes to data collection. A lot of people within the system, from teachers to nurses to principals, are collecting behavioral and mental health data and information, but the systems used often aren't connected in any capacity. Connecting them is critical to ensuring this data is shared across all parties in a way that it can be acted on when patterns are noticed.

Martinez-Prather noted that districts are looking toward emerging technologies on this front and wanting to implement them, but the elephant in the room is access to resources. Tech is more costly in its early development, but as it continues to emerge, grow and become more affordable, schools will want and be able to access it. During incidents, one of the things schools and districts want most are better communication platforms and protocols, as many of these incidents share a common breakdown of communication between them.

Proactive data intelligence can help schools and districts engage athletic programs and other school groups to reach out to transitional students new to schools who might not know anyone, helping them fit in and develop a sense of community in their new environment, Marianos said.

From a personal perspective, he told attendees that when he led the ATF investigation following the Columbine shooting, agents began to examine the root of the problem and saw several points that could have been prevented with better intelligence. Among them: That the shooters had guns, that teachers had interactions with the students about their "trench coat mafia" and drawings, that counselors had knowledge of their destructive behavior, and that many parents also knew about the two.

At the time, however, there wasn't a collection of this information and data to unite those observations and signal an intervention to prevent the tragedy.

"Everybody's gotta be on the same page here," he said, adding that he's getting tired of everyone in Washington screaming that we've got to do something and nothing happens and that it's time for real, proactive policy changes. "I haven't seen one change since that morning in April [1999]."

Failing is part of life, but how can you help students understand that?

In another packed afternoon session, Margarita Geleske, Uncharted Learning's "chief evangelist" led a discussion with Glenbard East High School (Illinois) Business Education Department Chairperson Peter Hostrawser, Ridge High School (Texas) teacher Dana Jones, and Lake Forest High School (Illinois) teacher Joe Pulio on the importance of helping students (and, often, their parents) understand that failure is a learning experience and part of life.

While all three educators on the panel use Uncharted Learning's INCubatoredu program in their business/entrepreneurship classes, Geleske clarified early on that pitching the program wasn't the panel's intent - failing forward is a skill that applies across all subject areas.

Entrepreneurship, however, is a natural fit for this skill because of the goal of "getting to failure fast" when starting a new business. Doing so, after all, helps identify the weak parts of the business model and strengthen them for future success.

In the business sector, failure is seen as an opportunity to understand where one might have gone wrong (as long as that failure isn't catastrophic), but in the traditional school sense, failure is looked at as a bad thing. Students, Hostrawser said, don't want to look like they don't know what they're doing, so educators have to teach them that it's OK to fail and create a safe place for them to do that. He likes to set up the learning experience with students as "try to prove yourself wrong."

Educators also have to address parents' concerns, because they tend to be unhappy when they think their children have fallen short of expectations - with some even viewing anything but an A as failure.

Pulio added that it's important to teach students that feedback doesn't equal failure. "I try to teach my students that we're 'not doing school anymore,'" he said. "Sitting in a group and waiting for someone else to do something isn't going to work."

Jones reiterated that giving students life skills is among the important parts of education, and that dealing failure is part of life and part of starting a business. And Hostrawser added that another challenge is that students don't want to fail again. But they have to learn the experimentation cycle of build, test, learn, apply and repeat. This ultimately builds skills in problem-solving, creativity, public speaking, teamwork and adaptability.

Reading Is Fundamental becomes exclusive home to LeVar Burton's Skybrary

Thursday also included an announcement from Reading Is Fundamental (RIF), the nation's largest nonprofit organization for children's literacy, that it is exclusively home to Skybrary, an interactive library of high-quality digital books and video resources from LeVar Burton Kids.

Skybrary is based on the Peabody Award-winning TV series Reading Rainbow that Burton hosted from 1983 to 2009. Its resources for children ages 2 to 11 include over 900 unique books, 150 video field trips, a parent dashboard, interactive animations to enhance the reading experience, and a K-3 supplemental Skybrary School service with standards-aligned lessons and teacher management tools.

"Skybrary provides an exciting array of opportunities for today's young learners to connect with fun and educational experiences that engage their minds and open their world to new possibilities," RIF President and CEO Alicia Levi said in a release. "We are honored to continue to work with LeVar Burton to provide this exciting offering to millions of children nationwide."

Keep an eye out in the coming days for Education Dive's full conversation with Burton and Levi from the show.

Project Unicorn and ISTE unveil ed tech buying guide

Closing out the day, we checked out a joint announcement from Project Unicorn and ISTE as they debuted " Better Edtech Buying for Educators: A Practical Guide" in a session that featured inflatable unicorns, a churro bar, and a broad selection of candy.

"We want kids to be producers in educational app environments. That's where the power is. We want to push our kids and teachers further in their thinking about that." -@curtmould @sunprairiek12 #SXSWEDU #SXSW19 cc: @projunicorn pic.twitter.com/yKNa50L2Ho
- ISTE (@iste) March 6, 2019

The guide itself walks district leaders through aligning ed tech purchases with student learning goals and standards, the importance of research and evidence, ensuring data interoperability between applications as well as student privacy, addressing implementation challenges and providing ongoing support, and incorporating educators as purchasing partners.

Great presentation (and swag) by the folks @projunicorn 548 products is too many ????‍♀️I've heard this sentiment from teachers multiple times. There's fatigue from the number of options. How do we help teachers pick the best choices for their students in a crowded landscape? pic.twitter.com/VhYMH1LZ4i
- Mila Kuznetsova (@milameelah) March 6, 2019

More than 548 ed tech products are used monthly by districts with at least 1,000 students, making the process of discerning what works and what can be improved to better serve students and educators critical. And with ISTE's annual conference coming up in June and the tech procurement season kicking into high gear in the coming months, the guide's timing couldn't be better.

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SXSW EDU 2019: Making school safety more proactive and teaching students to learn from failure

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As the 2019 SXSW EDU conference rounded the bend into its final full day at the Austin Convention Center in Texas, attendees once again packed the fourth floor's Ballroom D for a morning keynote. Today's topic: America's Reconstruction period following the Civil War and how that era still continues to haunt the nation 150 years later on historical, sociological and political levels.

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Slide 2  How Do You Walk Back Into a Classroom Again: Teaching in the Age of School Shootings

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Slide 2  How Do You Walk Back Into a Classroom Again: Teaching in the Age of School Shootings

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How do you walk back into a classroom again: teaching in the age of school shootings

This article was from the perspective of a teacher. It shows how demanding the job of an educator is. The politicians and lawmakers have no idea what it’s like to enter a classroom after a school shooting. Very traumatic to say the least. One has to go back to their job, time and time again. Lawmakers juggle with the idea of having teachers carry guns, but they may not fully understand how that may affect teachers in future.

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O n Jan. 23, three weeks into the spring semester, a 15-year-old sophomore named Gabe Parker brought his stepfather's 9-millimeter Ruger handgun to Marshall County High School in Western Kentucky, opened fire on the more than 600 students who were milling about the main common area waiting for the morning bell to ring, then dropped his weapon near the auditorium and disappeared into the chaos he had created.

Teachers were the first responders. Before police officers and medics arrived, they gathered sobbing, vomiting, bleeding kids into the safest rooms they could find, then locked the doors and kept vigil with them through the stunned and terrified wait. They shepherded the injured to hospitals in their own cars. And they knelt on the ground with the ones who were too wounded to move, stanching blood flow with their own hands and providing whatever comfort and assurance they could muster.

For the history teacher Erin Mathis, those few minutes passed like hours. She was not in the commons during the shooting, but when the health teacher screamed that students had been shot, she and a few others found themselves running toward where the sound of bullets had been heard. Mathis, whose only medical experience consisted of candy-striping as a preteen, prayed as she ran. God, you are going to have to do this. Because I cannot.

Superintendent Trent Lovett was just walking into his office, a short distance from the high school, when Principal Patricia Greer called to tell him that at least one student was down. He jumped back in his truck and raced up the access road that connected the two buildings, calling his own freshman daughter along the way to make sure she was safe. When he arrived, he saw that several students had been shot and that each of them was being attended to by at least one faculty or staff member. They had no clue where the shooter was, or if he was coming back, Lovett thought. And they didn't know if there were other shooters - or bombs or other weapons - in the offing. Hadn't some mass shooters rigged their targets in advance with explosives? Police and ambulance were on their way, his own daughter was safe and the students who weren't wounded had either fled or were hiding with other educators. So Lovett did the next thing he could think to do: He grabbed an aluminum bat from an abandoned bag of sports equipment and went looking for the teenage boy with the gun.

Parker had slipped into the weight room, where Rob McDonald, a gym teacher and baseball coach, was keeping watch over 75 or so other frantic students whom he had managed to shelter from the panic. Two of those students had been shot. Two others approached McDonald and, in a whisper, informed him that the shooter was among them. While his teacher's aide went to call a school administrator, McDonald moved across the room as discreetly as possible, positioned himself right behind the boy in question and braced himself for trouble. If he moves, McDonald thought, I'll floor him. Parker's hands were tucked into his coat pockets. It was a winter coat, and McDonald could not tell if it contained a gun. He thought briefly about what he might do if he could reach his own gun, which was in the glove box of his car. But the truth was, he had no way of knowing if this was the right kid or not. It seemed incredible to him that a boy would shoot up the school and then hide with his own victims. He was still in doubt when police officers came to the weight room several minutes later and aimed their own weapons at the boy. Not until he heard those cops ask Parker where the gun was, and watched Parker answer calmly, without denying anything, did the truth finally sink in.

Lovett returned to the commons and took stock. The floor was slicked with blood and spilled beverages and littered with abandoned backpacks. Dozens of cellphones rang without pause. One staff member was tending to Preston Cope, a sophomore whose family Lovett knew well and who appeared to have been shot in the head. Cope's phone was ringing, too, and for a split second Lovett considered ignoring it. The screen read "Dad," and Lovett was not practiced in delivering such news. But he quickly thought better of that impulse, remembering how desperate he had been for information after one of his own children was in an ultimately fatal car accident. He answered the phone, told Cope's father that his son was not O.K., then issued a quick string of instructions: Hurry. Be safe. Pray.

By then, medics were starting to arrive, and a tortured bureaucracy was being erected around the mayhem. Lovett and Greer set up a system to field incoming calls and deployed staff members to each hospital that was receiving injured students. In all, 16 students had been shot, two of whom would die: Preston Cope on the way to the hospital, and Bailey Holt right there in the commons. Holt's parents were looking for her at the middle school, where students were being bused and where parents were being told to go. Lovett arranged for them to be taken to the meeting room in a nearby fire station and went with two officers to meet them there. They shouldn't have to hear it in front of everyone, he thought. This time, though, he didn't have to say a word. When the girl's parents turned the corner and saw only Lovett waiting for them, they knew their daughter was dead.

For all the fear they inspire, school shootings of any kind are technically still quite rare. Less than 1 percent of all fatal shootings that involve children age 5 to 18 occur in school, and a significant majority of those do not involve indiscriminate rampages or mass casualties. It has been two decades since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold ushered in the era of modern, high-profile, high-casualty shootings with their massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. According to James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, just 10 of the nation's 135,000 or so schools have experienced a similar calamity - a school shooting with four or more victims and at least two deaths - since then. But those 10 shootings have had an outsize effect on our collective psyche, and it's not difficult to understand why: We are left with the specter of children being gunned down en masse, in their own schools. One such event would be enough to terrify and enrage us. This year, we had three.

Teachers are at the quiet center of this recurring national horror. They are victims and ad hoc emergency workers, often with close ties to both shooter and slain and with decades-long connections to the school itself. But they are also, almost by definition, anonymous public servants accustomed to placing their students' needs above their own. And as a result, our picture of their suffering is incomplete.

[Watch educators as they tell us in their own words about what it's like to to teach in an era of school shootings.]

We know that the trauma that teachers experience after a school shooting can be both severe and enduring. "Their PTSD can be as serious as what you see in soldiers," says Robert Pynoos, co-director of the federally funded National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, which helps schools coordinate their responses to traumatic events. "But unlike soldiers, none of them signed up for this, and none of them have been trained to cope with it." We know that teachers who were least able to protect their students in the moment tend to be especially traumatized. "For teachers, the duty to educate students is primary," Pynoos says. "But the urge to protect those students is deeper than that." And we know that their symptoms can include major sleep disturbance, hair-trigger startle responses and trouble regulating emotions.

But we don't know much else. Researchers have calculated the rates of PTSD for a host of other traumatic experiences, estimating that it affects up to 20 percent of combat soldiers and 40 percent of rape survivors. But we have no analogous statistics for educators who survive school shootings, nor any sense of how such an experience - not to mention its hyperpoliticized, media-frenzied aftermath - might affect their ability to teach or their long-term career trajectories. "Those are important questions that really need further study," Pynoos says.

In the meantime, teachers who survived shootings are doing what they can to fill in the blanks themselves. Paula Reed, an English teacher who once taught Dylan Klebold and who retired from Columbine this spring, says that she and her colleagues reach out to schools after every incident - "Columbine always calls," she says - to offer support and answer whatever questions they can. The questions, she says, are always the same: How long until I feel better? Will I ever be able to teach again? When will I get my old self back? Reed tries to tell the teachers the things she wishes someone had told her, starting with the fact that it takes years - not weeks - to recover. "You'd be surprised how many people don't get that," she says. "Six weeks after Sandy Hook, some parents and spouses were already asking why the teachers weren't better yet."

For years, she and a few others had these conversations through an informal network. A shooting would make headlines, and they would contact the school directly, or teachers would come to them independently, seeking perspective and guidance. This year, Reed created a private Facebook page specifically for fellow educator-survivors. It has 62 members so far. "This was my last year teaching," Reed says. "And it was, sadly, filled with school shootings." Four weeks after the Marshall County shooting, a former student killed three educators and 14 students and wounded 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. And three months after that, another school shooter, in Santa Fe, Tex., killed eight students and two teachers and injured 13 others.

In the aftermath of those events, politicians, policymakers, health officials and entrepreneurs have proffered a litany of solutions to what is now commonly thought of as the school-shooting problem. Among other things, schools have been advised to teach teachers to use tourniquets; ramp up active-shooter drills; get rid of active-shooter drills; ban backpacks; make backpacks bulletproof; teach teachers to teach compassion. Forget compassion, teach them to use guns. Forget compassion and guns and teach them how to identify budding psychopaths before they blossom into murderers. For the teachers themselves, each demand brings its own implicit expectations and its own fresh roster of uncertainties. Should they be prepared to take a bullet for their charges? To shoot one student for the sake of protecting others? Is it their job to prevent these things from happening in the first place?

Regular coursework was quasi-suspended after the Marshall County shooting, but the teachers still had lessons to impart. Jenny Darnall and Kelly Weaver, who taught English and history, respectively, wanted to make sure their students took stock of the kindness enveloping the school. Look at the banners and letters and cards pouring in from across the country, they told them. Look at the comfort quilts and comfort dogs and comfort food. See the fellowship in it. And remember: When the time comes, you will do the same for others.

Cory Westerfield, a teacher of algebra and German and the girls' track coach, was adamant that his students not live in fear forever. When the starting pistol sent one of his star athletes into a panic, right as she was preparing to do the triple jump, he coaxed her onto the field, gently but firmly. "You're going to walk down there really, really slowly," he said, pointing to the other side of the field. "And then walk back really, really slowly." Living in fear was not really living, he told her. It was just existing. And he wanted them to do more than just exist.

The teachers were harder on themselves, though. They, too, had meltdowns: in rushing crowds, at airports, when they were momentarily separated from their own children. They sometimes berated themselves for these reactions, aware that others around them had been through much worse. Westerfield thought of Mathis's getting literal blood on her hands and felt ashamed of his own tears. Mathis thought of other teachers - who, after the E.M.T.s took the most severely injured away, followed the trails of blood to other students who needed help - and despaired that she had not gone with them. Kelly Weaver thought of her own children and how, at the end of the day, she could still go home and hug them.

What troubled Westerfield most was that none of them had seen it coming. After two decades of teaching, he considered himself a skilled reader of teenagers. He liked to think he could tell when something was bothering one of them just by how they walked into his classroom. But with this boy - this shooter - he had detected nothing. Parker sat in Westerfield's German class for two school years in a row. He could hold an adult conversation. He had friends. He was making decent grades. And, as far as anyone could tell, he was not being bullied. (Parker's trial date is pending, and in the absence of a plea from his lawyer, the judge in the case has entered an automatic plea of not guilty.) If a boy like that could suddenly turn murderous, then in theory, any one of their students could do anything. Whom could they trust - how could they trust - after something like this? And if the answer was that they couldn't, what then?

Jenny Darnall decided to re-evaluate her understanding of what it meant to be a teacher in the first place. She had never been particularly compassionate with the students. The way she saw it, her job was to educate them, not give them advice they should be getting from their parents. But now, she felt as if God were telling her to step up and do more: Call parents more and tell them the hard truths she might normally expect them to discover on their own. Talk to the kids more too. Tell them that they are loved, even when they're being terrible. Those things did not feel like part of her job. But maybe now they would have to be.

The school's culinary instructor, Amy Cathey, was uncertain about these shifting boundaries. A few students had called her seeking practical advice about how to navigate their trauma outside school - for instance, how to tell their own parents that the prospect of lighting fireworks terrified them. Cathey didn't mind the calls, or the questions. But she wondered what would happen when she wasn't there. She worried about the graduating seniors. And she dreaded returning to anything resembling those eight or so weeks after the shooting, when it felt as if she took care of everyone except herself. She loved her kids. But she also knew herself, and she knew she couldn't sustain that anymore.

In May, Marshall Strong signs were still everywhere; they wobbled in people's front yards, hung from doors in floral wreaths, peeked out the back windows of cars. There were even some billboards still up along the highway. Some of the teachers had grown weary of these signs. They weren't over what had happened, of course. But they were ready to will themselves into the next phase of recovery, whatever that might be. This was a tricky place to be, in part because not everyone reached it at the same time. Westerfield waited until the school year officially ended, and not a second longer, to take the Marshall Strong sign out of his own yard.

But Mathis couldn't bring herself to take the Marshall Strong bracelet off, and her husband was worried. They lost a pregnancy early in their marriage, and he remembered how afterward she refused to remove the hospital bracelet; doing so, he suspected, would somehow make the miscarriage real to her. He worried that the Marshall bracelet was having the same effect - facilitating a denial that would ultimately keep her from moving on. She managed to tuck the bracelet away in a drawer by summer, but even then, a part of her wanted to put it back on, as if by doing so she could unmake the entire nightmare.

One weekend in July, Cathey drove from Kentucky to Colorado, to meet Paula Reed in person. The women had connected on Facebook, and had been texting and emailing for weeks. If the trip sounded crazy to outside observers, it made perfect sense to Reed. Driving cross-country with a small child in tow was a great way to distract a traumatized brain. Over breakfast at a diner, the two women reviewed the map of their shared reality. The terrain was deeply familiar to Reed but still painfully new to Cathey. They took turns pointing out various landmarks and junctures - the last funeral, the first school shooting after yours - and nodding in emphatic relief. Yes, that happened to us too. Yes, we had the same problem exactly.

From the inside, a mass shooting can feel distinctly unchartable. But Reed - and Pynoos, and Melissa Brymer, his colleague at the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress - say that while each school shooting is different in its particulars, several features are common to all. For example, Brymer says, it can be the secondary trauma that undoes a school's recovery. "After a shooting, everyone wants to talk about how to find the next shooter so that this doesn't happen again," Brymer says. "But that's not what the school itself needs to focus on. We've had suicides, car accidents, overdoses." For a school that's already traumatized, she says, these follow-up events can be incredibly devastating.

Brymer advises schools to conduct mental-health screenings before anniversaries, to find the people who are struggling most and help them. The hierarchy of hurt can split in surprising ways. For the most part, people closest to the carnage are the most traumatized, and people farther away are less so. But any teacher might be plagued by any number of things, including what they saw and how they responded in the moment. One educator might flee the building in a panic, leaving his students behind, only to be devastated by guilt afterward. Another might behave heroically, then seethe with resentment over not getting enough recognition. Each will need counseling and support to fully recover.

A common lament among educator-survivors is the way that personal boundaries shift within the school community. Abbey Clements, who taught second grade at Sandy Hook, says that after the shooting, she would take her entire class to the bathroom at the same time, so that no one would have to leave her sight. But as they drew their students close, she says, she and her colleagues distanced themselves from one another. "You're afraid that if you start talking about your own trauma, you might trigger someone else's," she says. "You're also afraid of looking weak or unstable, afraid you'll be asked to leave or take leave if you admit how much you're struggling."

As a result, many teachers bury their fear and anger and guilt, until it changes into something else entirely. The question of where to erect a memorial, or when to take one down, can create fierce divisions. So might similar questions about how long to allow comfort dogs on campus, or what to do with the mountain of gifts and condolences that pile up. Students may come close to blows over whether to discuss the shooting during class time. Teachers may feel close to doing the same. "It's not all 'Kumbaya,' " Clements says. "When the system is cracked by a trauma of this magnitude, a lot of stuff leaks out. It gets messy. And it can change relationships."

The job itself also changes. Reed spent the rest of her career vaguely wary of all her students. "You still love them," she says, "and you still bond with them. But you never again feel certain that none of them would ever kill you." Even teachers who love what they do may think about doing something else. "If your bank got robbed while you were in it, you would never go to that bank again," Clements says. "But with this, you have to go back every single day." And leaving is not as easy as it sounds. Relocating can cost hard-won seniority and the salary that goes with it. And separating yourself from the people you just survived a shooting with can be excruciating. "They're the people that trigger you most," Clements says. "But they're also the only ones who understand what you're going through. Because how can anyone understand this that hasn't been through it?"

Since the Parkland shooting, at least 14 states have introduced measures that would enable educators to carry firearms on the job. The idea itself is not new; we've been debating it since at least 2006, when a gunman killed five children in a one-room schoolhouse in western Pennsylvania. But as the proposed measures indicate, lawmakers seem to be considering it with renewed urgency. Teachers have largely resisted this call to arms, pointing out that it would alter the student-teacher dynamic in irrevocable ways. "My job is to educate and nurture students," Mathis says. "How am I supposed to then also be prepared to shoot one of them?"

Matthew Mayer, a professor of educational psychology at Rutgers' Graduate School of Education, says that among experts the best solutions to school shootings are not really in dispute: basic gun control, more and better mental-health services and a robust national threat-assessment program. We also need to help educators create an atmosphere where students who hear about a potential threat feel comfortable sharing that information with adults. (Many student shooters, including Gabe Parker at Marshall County, hint about their plans to at least one other person or tell them outright. Getting those others to inform teachers is one of our best options for preventing shootings from happening in the first place.)

In February, Mayer and his colleagues circulated an eight-point document titled "A Call for Action to Prevent Gun Violence in the United States of America," which summarized these and other key actions needed to reduce the risk of school shootings. So far, 4,400 educators and public-health experts have signed it. But political will is still missing. "We keep revisiting the same conversations every five or six years without learning or changing much of anything," Mayer says. "Armed guards and metal detectors make it look like you're doing something. You get far fewer points for talking about school climate and mental health."

The Marshall County school district banned book bags, installed metal detectors at the high school and hired four additional resource officers (armed deputy sheriffs). But Superintendent Lovett agrees that much more is needed. "We've made ourselves a fairly hard target," he says. "But truthfully, can I sit here and guarantee you that it's never going to happen again? No, I can't."

As summer waned and the new academic year approached, some Marshall teachers were feeling torn. Mathis found that while she was not afraid to return to work herself, she dreaded sending her own children, ages 6 and 10, back to their school. She knew that it was safe, and that they would be just fine. "I know nothing is going to happen there," she told her colleagues. But she could not stop the next thought from coming: I thought nothing would happen here.

Before the shooting, Westerfield always said he would quit or retire early if something like this happened. "I'm not dying on the job," he would quip. But returning felt like a sacred duty. How could any teacher who might replace him possibly understand what his students had been through? For that matter, how would any other school district understand what he had been through? At the same time, though, he was weary with grief. "There's this thing inside each of us now," he said. "We've lost something that we can never get back."

For Superintendent Lovett, who graduated from Marshall some 35 years ago, it came down to the simple fact that times had changed. Back then, as many kids as not had hunting rifles in their trucks, and no one ever brought a gun into the building. But, he thought, it was the lot of educators to serve as a constant, for both their students and the wider community. In four short years, every kid who survived the shooting would be gone from the school. For the most part, faculty and staff members would remain. They helped their students through the shooting and its excruciating aftermath. And they would be there this fall to see them through the year that followed. "Students eventually move on," he said. "Educators really don't."

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O n Jan. 23, three weeks into the spring semester, a 15-year-old sophomore named Gabe Parker brought his stepfather's 9-millimeter Ruger handgun to Marshall County High School in Western Kentucky, opened fire on the more than 600 students who were milling about the main common area waiting for the morning bell to ring, then dropped his weapon near the auditorium and disappeared into the chaos he had created.

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I feel very strongly about gun laws. While researching I found several websites and articles explaining potential gun laws. I am in complete agreement with lawmakers. However, as an educator, I would not feel comfortable carrying a gun on campus. Which was mentioned during my research.

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Interlandi, J. (2018, September 05). Teaching in the Age of School Shootings.      Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/05/magazine/school-shootings-teachers-support-armed.html

NEA's Bully Free: It Starts with Me. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.nea.org/home/neabullyfree.html

Protect Children Not Guns 2012. (2012). PsycEXTRA Dataset. doi:10.1037/e684812012-001

Riddell, R. (2019, March 07). SXSW EDU 2019: Making school safety more proactive and teaching students to learn from failure. Retrieved from https://www.educationdive.com/news/sxsw-edu-2019-making-school-safety-more-proactive-and-teaching-students-to/549887/

S. 42: Background Check Expansion Act. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s42/text

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School safety is important. During my research I was able to look at a number of different perspective of those affected by traumatic events involving school safety. First, I was able to review laws politicians are attempting to put in place. I feel that is a positive step in right direction.

I also viewed the teachers perspective on carrying guns in the classroom. I do not believe students or teachers will benefit from carrying guns on an everyday basis in the classroom.

In the counseling aspect, teachers and students who have experienced a traumatic event in a school setting suffer greatly. Teachers have a hard time returning to school,and trusting their students again. They may suffer from survivor's guilt. It is important for educators to keep an eye out for students who may be suffering from a mental illness. It’s better to have prevention plans in place to, rather than focus on the “what if’s”. This school year at my local high school, a student brought a loaded gun to a football game, there were absolutely no plans in place to prevent that from happening.