Tell Williams, a teacher in Philadelphia, keeps lollipops in his desk in case of an active shooter.
About a decade ago, the school Williams teaches at had been put on lockdown because a drunk man at the apartment complex across the street had a rifle. After the lockdown was lifted, Williams and his fellow teachers gathered in the hallway at the end of the day to talk about what had just happened. Williams’ fellow teacher told him that she keeps lollipops in the desk for her kindergarteners when there is an active shooter threat.
“I was thinking, like, why would you do that?” Williams told HuffPost. “And she was, like, ‘Well, because if the kids are eating them, they can’t cry and they can’t talk.’ I buy them now, but it was such a horrific moment being, like, Oh, my God. That is the only safety measure in keeping kids calm.”
By the time Williams was in his second lockdown, he had the lollipops ready. He took his students into the classroom’s bathroom, put his jacket under the door to block out the light and turned on his phone flashlight.
“I was making shadow puppets on the ceiling, trying to distract them so they wouldn’t cry and be scared,” he told HuffPost. “And that’s our safety measures as teachers. You have to convince the kids to stay quiet, to not scare them because we don’t want them to be scared and cry, but we also want them to take it seriously and not giggle.”
Williams initially told the lollipop story on TikTok just hours after a shooter killed two students and two teachers and injured nine others in a school in Winder, Georgia. The suspect in the Georgia shooting is just 14 years old, and Georgia does not have secure storage laws requiring gun owners to lock up their firearms to prevent kids from using them.
“I want that to sink in for a moment before you tell teachers like me that what happened today isn’t political, that what happened today, we don’t need gun reform for that ― because that’s bullshit,” Williams said in a TikTok that has drawn nearly 5 million views .
Lawmakers have been slow to enact any real gun reform in America even though guns are the leading cause of death in children. With no real gun reform, teachers and students are left to their own devices to fight against and survive gun violence, which U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy calls a public health crisis .
I was making shadow puppets on the ceiling, trying to distract them so they wouldn’t cry and be scared. And that’s our safety measures as teachers. Tell Williams, Philadelphia teacher
In 2018, Oakland University, a public school in Rochester Hills, Michigan, made news when it was revealed it hands out hockey pucks to students to use as weapons against an active shooter on campus.
“If you threw [a hockey puck] at a gunman, it would probably cause some injury. It would be a distraction, if nothing else,” Mark Gordon, the university’s police chief, told WXYZ-TV in Detroit at the time.
A high school teacher also in Michigan went viral on TikTok in 2022 for doing the same thing. The teacher said on TikTok that she wanted to give her students “something to prepare themselves” in case of a school shooting.
At Emily Thomas’ high school in Connecticut, the administrators provided their teachers with a first-aid kit and a bucket, just in case they were in lockdown for a while and a student needed to use the bathroom.
Thomas told HuffPost that she’s had to go in lockdown over threats just outside the school and it’s been “terrifying.” The school goes through a lockdown drill about every three months, but they don’t tell the teachers and students if it’s just a drill or a real threat.
“It’s kind of like a blind panic every time,” Thomas said.
When they’re called to go into lockdown, Thomas follows all procedures. Lock the door, close the blinds, turn off the projector, cover a mirror she has in her classroom, and gather the kids into a “quote unquote safe space,” Thomas said. Then she grabs her phone to check what the threat is.
Several districts across the country are experimenting with not allowing cellphones in class, a move Thomas has mixed emotions about. On the one hand, it would be nice for her students to stop relying on the internet for answers, but she knows firsthand the comfort of being a student in lockdown and having a cellphone nearby.
Thomas was an eighth grader in 2012 when 20 children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, only a few miles from her middle school.
“I was texting my mom furiously on my phone,” she said, “even though I wasn’t supposed to have my phone.”
At Mikayla Dane’s school, teachers are given a metal U-bolt that acts as a lock to place on the door in case of an active shooter.
In a TikTok just days after the Georgia school shooting, Dane said the bolt makes her feel better.
“It’s sad that I’m holding it now because it makes me feel better,” she said in the TikTok video, which has more than 5 million views.
After there’s a school shooting somewhere in the country, Dane, a high school teacher in Missouri, told HuffPost, she looks at her class and thinks about the possibility of it happening at her school.
“I don’t know what I would do in that situation,” the 24-year-old said. “We’re trained for it, and I mean, I know what I would do, but emotionally it’s just so hard to think about. Being in charge of them, it is just so scary to think that these kids are relying on me and my guidance on what they should do in that situation, and that is frightening to think about.”
The threat of an active shooter looming over Williams sent him back to college to get a degree in social work to become a therapist so he could help students learn to regulate their emotions. Though he doesn’t believe mental health or bullying is the root cause of school shootings, he wants to help address a student’s emotions and encourage the parent to take steps to help them.
“What keeps me there now is that I can now partner with parents and students and teachers and say, ‘What emotional and social skills do the kids need to work on now?’” Williams said.
“How do we teach them empathy? How do we have these safety measures in place so that if a student’s feeling angry about something or sad about something or scared about something, that we can hopefully talk about this now, so that if we have a student who’s having volatile thoughts ... we can address them now and really encourage the parents to take steps so we don’t have incidences like in Oxford, Michigan , or in Georgia.”
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