My parents went to school in the 1950s, when they had to participate in the (in)famous “duck and cover” drills. The idea: Hiding under your desk made you safe from a nuclear attack, important at the height of the Cold War.
As a Gen Xer, the only drills I ever participated in at school were the garden-variety fire drills. Not fun, but not exactly nerve-wracking, either. This past week, I was exposed to one thing jangling the nerves of my children’s generation.
I was spending my Wednesday morning talking to Belmont High School AP Biology classes about DNA plasmids. I was about five minutes into my last class, which happened to be my daughter’s class, when a loud beep came over the intercom. A calm voice announced that “shelter in place” was going into effect and details would be sent to teachers via email.
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There was some murmuring across the classroom as the teacher asked a student to help her move a table in front of the door. That done, she asked me to carry on as if nothing was happening. For the most part, the students seemed fine with this suggestion. Two students did elect to go hide behind the teacher’s desk in the corner of the room, but the rest sat calmly and waited for me to continue.
So I did, but unlike the previous presentations I gave that day, I stumbled over my words and lost my train of thought more frequently. My daughter was sitting just a few feet away from me, and I had no idea what kind of danger she or her friends were in. About 20 minutes later, we once again heard the loud beep and an announcement that the “shelter in place” was over. The teacher moved the table back to where it belonged and the two students who had been ducking behind the desk went back to their seats. My heart rate finally started to go back down.
That evening, my daughter showed me a picture taken by one of her friends. They had been on the ground floor and took a picture of an armored police officer carrying a rifle. The photo was taken through a classroom window. This had been a “swatting call.” According to the email parents received from Superintendent Jill Geiser that afternoon, “Swatting involves making false reports via social media posts or directly to law enforcement, often targeting schools or other public spaces, with the intent of provoking an overwhelming police response to a fabricated emergency.”
As I would learn later from friend and educator Stephanie Crement, “shelter in place” protocols are usually less intense than “lockdown” which entails staying in the room, bolting the door, getting low and hiding to be out of line with the windows, and staying silent (i.e. not teaching).
The emergency at Belmont High School may have been a fabrication, but the police response was very real. My anxiety was also real, as I’m sure it was for many students and teachers.
But most of these high school juniors took the threat in stride because most of them had experienced several such “shelter in place” events already and knew it could not have been too serious an issue. Perhaps my own imagination was overreacting to this new experience. Either way, I don’t regret growing up with nothing but plain old fire drills.
Eric J. Perkins writes about Gen X for The Belmont Voice. When he’s not writing, he’s the Director of Transformation at Addgene, a life sciences nonprofit in Watertown.
