Everyone wants to live in the safest place in America

BY EILEEN BRADY
​THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO

On a January morning almost four years ago, my daughter was with friends in her kindergarten classroom just a couple of blocks from our home.
But I was 25 minutes away at Fort Belvoir, a large Army base in Virginia, when my phone rang. 
Another kindergarten parent was calling. Our children’s school was on lockdown. There was a shooter in the neighborhood. That was all the information my friend had.
Panic swiftly arrived, followed by a primal desire to get to my child, complicated by distance, strict speeding laws on base and urban traffic.
I can still remember the shade of the tree over the parking spot where I took the call; the angle from the entrance to where I was heading; the repeated cell-phone calls to reach my husband, who couldn’t be awoken at home that quickly after finishing a overnight shift. It’s all part of my flashbulb memory.
Slowly, details emerged: the man with the gun

was not loose in the streets, but instead had barricaded himself inside his house after shooting his girlfriend multiple times. Police surrounded his house a mile from the elementary school, waiting.

At my daughter’s school, the lockdown lasted an hour. The children were safe. 
The gunman hadn’t gone to the school, and he ended up killing himself after a 12-hour standoff with law enforcement. It was chalked up to a “domestic situation.” 
Some folks we know in Ohio chalked it up to “city problems.”
The terror it caused for parents and teachers at that school is something most of us will never forget — and that was after a brief hour of time that ended in complete safety for the children.
My friend Jocelyn had been volunteering in her son’s first-grade classroom when the “immediate lockdown” was announced. She and the teacher herded the kids into the bathroom inside the classroom, located just past the school office. 
Earlier this week, Jocelyn and I talked about that 2009 lockdown. She said she had been thinking, “If someone’s getting into the building, this is the first classroom they’re coming to.” 
The lockdown was on our minds because of the slaughter of women and children in Newtown, Conn., a tragedy that defies comprehension but engenders compassion. We have thought about those children, those teachers, those families. We have cried frequently — in empathy, in fear, in frustration, in anger, in sorrow, in joy, in guilt. 
When my family moved back to Ohio this summer, we had a choice about where our daughter would attend school. Three of the best school systems in the country are located in southwestern Ohio: Walnut Hills, Indian Hill and Wyoming. 
In our minds, though, we could justify choosing a rural district closer to family because it fulfilled our main priority of providing a safe environment for our daughter. Everyone wants their child to grow up in “the safest place in America.” 
Historically, Clinton County schools are safe places. Statistically, being in a school anywhere is one of the safest places a child can be. Shopping malls, street corners and children’s own homes are all more dangerous for kids.
Wendy Regoeczi, the director of Criminology Research at Cleveland State University, told a Cleveland TV station recently that the truth is that “schools, even in spite of this horrific incident that happened, are still the safest place for children in this country.”
Each Clinton County school superintendent told the News Journal this week about their safety plans and lockdown procedures. They comply with state demands regarding safety plans.
However, statistics also indicate that 80 percent of the 21 worst mass killings in the United States, as identified by the Hartford Courant, took place in suburban towns or rural areas, including every single one of the five “worst school massacres in U.S. history,” according the Atlantic Cities.
I have stood in classrooms during lockdown drills, impressed by the seriousness of the students as they crowd quietly into corners of darkened rooms with brightly colored construction paper covering the windows. I have stood near children practicing what they will do if someone attacks their schools, saddened to tears by the need for the need for those drills.
Most often during the lockdown drills, I have marveled at the sacrifice that teachers and administrators are willing to make for their students — for other people’s children. 
In the details that emerge after school shootings, there are frequent stories of teachers — and more than three-quarters of public school teachers are women — calming frightened children, sheltering them from danger, shielding them with their own bodies, and sacrificing themselves to try to quell the danger to their students. 
Those teachers are not trained for combat, yet they exhibit extraordinary bravery when their schools become targets of murderers. 
Besides, combat training and access to arsenals do not prevent innocent people from being mowed down by a gunman on a rampage. Just ask one of the 29 wounded at Fort Hood, Texas, where 13 military members were murdered four years ago.