To the editor: My 7-year-old child recently had an ALICE drill at school.
It's the one where someone walks through the school as though they were a shooter and the kids and their teachers have to respond how they would if there was actually someone trying to find them and kill them. This isn't like a fire drill where everything is planned in advance and everyone walks calmly to the meeting point. The students and teachers don't know exactly where the "intruder" is going to go or how they will need to react.
First, half the class hid in the bathroom and half the class hid in the closet. Then, they heard that the intruder was all the way at the other end of the school, so they made a run for it — but once they got outside, the intruder came out of the door by the gym.
The kids had to duck and hide, and my child slipped in the mud and fell.
Thank goodness they are little enough not to understand what it might mean if they slipped and fell and it was not a drill.
This country and this culture are disgraceful and shameful.
I wish peaceful dreams for all the district's students and teachers tonight, but I expect I'll be having nightmares about my baby slipping and falling while running from an armed gunman. May every useless politician wake screaming every night, haunted by the nightmares of parents who've lost their children to school shootings.
Amanda Dalzell, Pittsfield