‘For all the many reasons teachers should be thanked, this should not be one of them'
Who is surprised anymore when news breaks that another school has been the scene of a shooting and the lives of everybody in that community are forever changed?
It happened again Tuesday in Colorado when two students allegedly opened fire in STEM School Highlands Ranch — a charter school campus with more than 1,800 students in kindergarten through 12th grade — and killed one person while injuring eight others. A student who charged one of the shooters to help protect others lost his life.
The Colorado shooting followed by just days a shooting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte that killed two and wounded four. A student tackled the gunman in that case, too.
We are in an era where students and teachers may find themselves in a position of dodging bullets or taking on shooters directly to save others’ lives.
The Colorado shooting occurred during Teacher Appreciation Week, which inspired one educator to write a letter honoring his colleagues and speaking to this moment in the country’s violent history.
The author of the following post is Rich Ognibene, a chemistry and physics teacher in New York who was that state’s 2008 Teacher of the Year and a 2015 National Teacher Hall of Fame inductee.
By Rich Ognibene
Today, during Teacher Appreciation Week, I’m thinking about the teachers (and paras, and secretaries, and administrators) at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado.
Like teachers at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland and myriad other schools, they will be scarred for life from the trauma they’ve faced in a school shooting. They will cry for the students who were killed. They will feel less CONTINUE READING: ‘For all the many reasons teachers should be thanked, this should not be one of them' - The Washington Post
