The Columbine Drill

Very matter-of-factly my seventh grader informed me that her school was going to have a “lock down” drill this week. “What’s a lock down drill,” I asked. I always thought “lock down” was what they talked about during a riot in a prison movie. Well, it turns out that it is pretty much the same thing here. “It’s where we practice what to do if something really really bad was happening in the school.”

Welcome to 2005. Kids practice “lock down” techniques in the case of a crazy person (student or otherwise) should enter the school with guns a blazing. As a parent, this is totally petrifying to even ponder. School is out of your grasp and out of your protection. On the one hand you’re thankful they’re prepared (sort of), on the other you damn the fact that they need to be.

I suppose this is the 2005 equivalent of “the Russian’s are coming” bomb drills you see in 1950’s education films. Those must have been an ever present scare in some minds as well. In the late 1970’s in Michigan, all of our drills were for tornados. The only thing you needed to remember in a tornado drill, save keeping your head between your knees and a textbook over your head was to…open the window. You see a tornado could cause a sudden change in air pressure outside, and if the window were not open could cause the large plate glass windows to shatter all over the place. At least at Winans’ Elementary.

Angry Columbine kids seem so much more real, more regular, and more dangerous than those nuclear bomb films.