It was the week after Sandy Hook. My students were doing these in-depth presentations about their topic of choice for a good chunk of their grade. More than one was doing a presentation on violence: gun violence, school violence, bullying.

It was after school when some students with grave, serious looks sough me out. They had heard a fellow student talk about bringing a weapon to school the next day. They had gone to the administration. They were concerned they weren’t being heard. They came to me. I went up the chain of command and made some noise, hoping to amplify their voices.

It was in the afternoon when I was driving to my kid’s elementary school when I called a friend, unsure of what I should do next. Do I stay home the next day? I mean, I had three young children? Do I go to school and run through the thousands of scenarios I had drawn up to try to keep students safe? I was shaken up.

It was the next day, after the student had been in my class, that he was expelled. Of course, I never heard exactly what had happened. Rumors of “parts of a gun” found in his backpack and “weapons” in his vehicle were thrown around like a basketball in a gym, but I never actually knew.

But I knew that student. I had worked with them. I wanted them to succeed. I wanted them to thrive. My heart broke.

And I knew the others in my classes and the ones who passed my doorway in between classes. I, too, wanted them to live, thrive.

And I was scared.

Nothing “happened” that week in my class. Yet after every shooting, every intruder drill, every lock-and-bar-the-door procedure, every request that we think of the safest place for our students to be in our classrooms which had me figuring how to get all 35 of the students on the ledge outside of my second floor classroom of windows so they might have a chance of being safe, I think of that week. That week when I was already on high alert for copy cats, that week made even more so with the student who proposed a threat and the reality of what could have happened in my classroom that day.

It again is the day after a mass shooting, the day after a mass school shooting, the day after a mass elementary school shooting. I refuse to believe we can do nothing. My faith compels me to pray, and that prayer includes action, fighting for a world in which swords or automatic weapons are beat into plowshares and tools for building a better world (see Isaiah 2:4 and https://rawtools.org/about/). We do not need these weapons, they are not doing us any good. They cause pain, death, anxiety, mental illness. We need a different way.

Will you forge one with me?