<p>One of our local elementary schools had an incident today that necessitated the school lock-down, police called, and the other schools in the district also were either locked down or put on alert. No clear details other than some sort of domestic dispute that spilled onto school grounds. According to the district, school officials and law enforcement handled the incident without any big problems arising. </p>
<p>Now on the local newspaper's Facebook page, there are all sorts of parents ripping the school district because the school didn't call all of the kids' homes immediately. Instead the message from the school superintendent was broadcast via the automated calling system about an hour later. After the school day ended and kids were gone from school...</p>
<p>I really just asked the question on Facebook... "Would you have preferred they called in the middle of the incident? Hope they don't give out any wrong information!"</p>
<p>I understand wanting to know, but really what good would it have done to make that call as the incident is occurring? Do these people not understand the school officials have MORE IMPORTANT things to do first.. like protect the students!</p>
<p>I am not sure what our district does, as I no longer have a child in the district. ( although I did 5 years ago & at that time, I only heard about lock downs after the fact from my D).
However, I get text messages from her university, re:assaults, or other emergencies that they want those on or interested in the campus to be aware of.</p>
<p>I think that would serve the purpose, although if there is a shelter in place or lockdown, you really dont want all the parents to be surrounding the school.</p>
<p>Right. I suspect that if they were notified right away lots of parents would try to go to the school. Aside from the fact that the school is busy handling the situation, there’s nothing to be gained bu the parents knowing right that minute.</p>
<p>I think schools should do what they deem necessary to secure the safety of the students. If this means not letting parents know what is going until after it is over, so be it. If the school let parents know at the very moment something is going on, many of them would drop everything, rush to the school and demand that their children be released immediately, and to hell with anything or anyone else. I honestly think kids are safer at school in many instances. There is safety in numbers, schools are often the first to be taken care of in an emergency, and school children are among the easiest to work with in an evacuation or emergency, since they are familiar with group movement procedures. This is my I left my children at school on 9/11.</p>
Your first mistake was to even LOOK at the FB replies on various news outlets. I regret every single second I’ve ever spent looking at others’ opinions in reply to website article posts. Nothing to be gained – just reactionary rantings, mostly.</p>
<p>I think no matter what the school did in response to the incident, there would be unhappy comments on the FB page. I noticed that on my school system’s FB page. They announce a closure - they get flack. They announce no closure - they get flack. There are always unhappy parents.</p>
<p>They can’t win under any circumstance, it seems. Especially on snow days. Our county is large and while city streets may be open and passable, it’s a different story in unincorporated areas. Parents complain that they close the schools at the first sign of a snow flurry. But let them stay open and have a school bus slide into a telephone pole and a kid hit his head, and they would get sued for everything they had and then some. So they usually err on the side of caution and I don’t blame them. My youngest is a senior so after this winter it won’t be my problem anymore (getting a little misty-eyed at that thought…)</p>
<p>My experience is that there are no open communications during a lockdown. One never knows who, on that automated system, might NOT be someone you want to know the “details” of what is happening.</p>
<p>In addition, as noted upstream, an hour after the incident, the message sent was able to be more concise and accurate.</p>
We learned that the hard way a few years ago here in West Virginia during the Sago mining disaster. An initial text message from the rescue site read “Seven Alive” when the seven were actually deceased. A horrible mix-up and very hard on the waiting families and the public.</p>
<p>In my kids’ international school, I’ve lost count of how many times school got shut down bcs of bomb/terrorist threat. Kids think lock-down drill is no more remarkable than fire-drill. All cars entering campus get searched inside & underneath for explosives/guns.</p>
<p>I think that anyone who thinks this sort of reaction from parents is “only in America” hasn’t ever spent much time out of this country. Based on a couple of years in the UK, American parents haven’t got anything on British parents when it comes to excitability.</p>
<p>With 7 kids going to public schools in 3 districts over the years, and now teaching at a private school myself, we have seen our share of “incidents.” Fires, bomb/shooting threats, fights, an elementary student with a loaded gun, parents trying to pick up their kids being held in a shelter during a tornado warning. . .Usually an email comes from the principal at the end of the day to explain what happened. Unless there is something that requires parents to pick up their kids immediately, that is just how it is done. I never thought I should be getting information faster than the people in the building. I’ve never seen/heard any public complaints about the way the district handled things–and this is a very large district.
The school where I teach had a lockdown this fall. I didn’t even know why until I heard about it on the news (someone had threatened to “shoot up a school,” so all schools in the area locked down.)
But while we were locked down, we teachers didn’t know exactly why. I kept teaching like nothing was happening because I wanted the students to remain calm. We didn’t hear anything unusual in the halls or outside. I thought, “Surely the principal would sound more stressed, and would have let us know if someone were IN the BUILDING.” After we got an “all-clear,” we only heard that the “person” was in police custody. (I realized then that my classrooms cannot be locked from the inside. And we haven’t had any drills on school-shooter situations. I actually looked around the classrooms later to see if there is any place to hide, take shelter there.)</p>
<p>My third grader came home with a fantastic sounding story recently–that the police came to her school, and that the school psychologist had been arrested and was crying as she was taken away in handcuffs. No message about any incident came from the principal. I had a conference with the teacher that week and asked what really happened: a handicapped student had gotten out of control and hit a teacher. A school resource officer from a nearby high school came to assist. There were no handcuffs involved. The school psychologist was upset, may have been crying.</p>
<p>The parents around here don’t seem to be excitable at all–or I haven’t been reading/listening in the right places.</p>