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MACKENZEE SIMMS | Staff Writer

On my first day of high school in 2015, my physical science teacher gave a tour of his classroom. He showed us the basket to turn in our homework, the drawer of extra school supplies and the bucket full of scissors in case we wanted to arm ourselves in the event of a school shooter.

Even in 2015, the reality of school shootings already hung over the heads of all kids.

Located in between a hospital and a residential neighborhood, my high school was a small, K-12 magnet school outside of Nashville with glass doors in almost every classroom.

Many of my fellow classmates—including myself—talked a big game about how we would make a run for it in the event of a shooter, and one day during my sophomore year, our school let us try.

Rather than have a typical lockdown drill, the school set up safety checkpoints outside of the school grounds and sent teachers with timers to see how fast we could evacuate. Students on the northeast side of the building would run to the hospital and students on the southwest side would run into the neighborhood.

I volunteered to be a runner because I wanted to miss a chemistry quiz that period.

When the drill began, I joined a group of volunteer runners in a mad dash to the hospital. I remember my ballet flats getting stuck when I tried to scale the waist-high fence. After yanking my foot free and inspecting my skin for cuts, I glanced up and saw an image that has stuck with me ever since.

It was the elementary schoolers. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me that they would try running too.

The kids were smiling with grass stains on their khaki uniform pants. The teachers were high fiving the students saying, “Congratulations! You made it!”

They had turned a school shooting drill into a little game so the kids wouldn’t be scared. Practice running from the bad guy and race to the hospital!

All of a sudden, I was horrified. There I was, 15 years old, practicing running from a school shooter when I should have been taking a chemistry quiz. Is this really the world we live in?

I looked around at the group as students wandered aimlessly in the grass, waiting for the all-clear signal. No one was concerned. My friend was complaining that our chemistry teacher was going to have us take the quiz anyway when we got back to the classroom.

What was more horrifying than the situation itself was how frightfully normal it all felt. If I hadn’t seen the elementary schoolers playing their little game, I would have probably forgotten about that day entirely.

That was almost a decade ago, but I have been thinking about it this week in light of the false shooting threats that have been made recently at multiple schools in Helena, Montevallo, Alabaster and Calera.

Students today live with a constant knowledge that they could be shot at school. That’s the new normal. I know that. I lived that. But it’s still hard to imagine why multiple students at multiple schools would call in false school shooting threats?

Have students today become so desensitized to school shootings that they have moved beyond the point where they can understand the gravity of issuing a school shooting threat? Or is it that the students already feel so threatened by school shootings on a day-to-day basis that issuing a fake threat makes them feel in control?

Why would they do this? Are they seeking attention? Lashing out? And most importantly, what can we do to help them?

I don’t know. How could I? All I know is that this new normal is not normal, but there’s no going back.