Teacher's Chilling Post About The Realities Of Active Shooter Drills Goes Viral

Teacher writes Facebook post about the gut-wrenching realities of shooter drills

In the wake of a series of horrific mass school shootings, some administrations are asking their staff to run active shooter drills. One teacher shared the realities behind that training on social media — and it’s completely, completely heartbreaking.

The teacher, who would like to remain anonymous, took to Facebook after she completed what she thought would be “just a drill.” She recounted sitting in her classroom, listening as one of her students yelled from just outside the door, and feeling every ounce of pain and sadness.

“My training calls for me to leave a shot student outside of my classroom even when they’re screaming for help,” she wrote. “It ripped through my heart to hear my kids yelling for someone to help them and to keep them safe and I can’t do that and keep other kids in my room safe.”

She ended up breaking protocal and left the classroom to “save” the student locked outside, bat in hand. “That’s what our options are, I take down a guy with an AK with my bat? OR I get to leave my own kid an orphan because you expect me to take down the gunman?” she tells Scary Mommy.

After the drill was done, the teacher looked down at her hands, which were covered in the fake blood stains from one of her student’s fake gunshot wounds, and said she felt “literally nauseous.”

“I do not understand how we got to this place America- where we’ve politicized and put a price tag on children’s safety,” she wrote in her Facebook post. “I didn’t sign up for this. So, how did we get here and how do we fix it now? Nothing is clearer and I cry.”

She clarified to us some details behind the drill. “I guess because I didn’t expect to be so shaken by the drill itself. I do want to make it clear that we did not have all students at school this day, a select few who had all the facts about what they were getting into were though and counselors were there as well. We live in a small rural area that has a lot of obstacles to overcome, God forbid that it happens here. So, the injuries that were assigned to different students was to actually test our local on call EMT’s and our very small hospital, to see what they could handle before we would have to rely on other medical agencies for help.”

It is completely sickening that teachers have been handed this horrific set of responsibilities. And while there’s a lot of debate about how to handle the current gun epidemic, this teacher has some pretty clearcut, reasonable suggestions.

“There has to be changes to gun laws, no one needs an AK, so I do have time to whack them with my bat in-between reloading,” she tells Scary Mommy. “There needs to be better mental health care.”

She also added that some responsibility lies in the hands of parents everywhere, who need to figure out how to raise “responsible, kind, good people” who know how to fail and can overcome obstacles. Basically, she explained, there’s a combination of issues at play right now and everyone has to set aside their finger pointing and come together to do some problem solving.

“We have to realize we all are a part of the solution and have to step up,” she said. “Nothing changes, because we can’t get past blame and while we can’t do that, kids and teachers get to suffer. It has to change.”

The teacher somberly sums up the reality facing many teachers in America today.

“As I sat in my room waiting for the drill to start, I think I was just blown away by the fact that the day before I had been dealing with a parent, arguing about why their kid shouldn’t have received a grade that they got on an assignment, but today I was required to sit in my room and decide who lives and who dies if it were actually taking place.”