Entry to kindergarten begins a new phase of life, for both the 5-year-old and their grown-ups. First Day of School nerves make perfect sense. School is terrifying.
Roughly four million kindergarteners start school in these late summer weeks. Parents, guardians and loving caregivers are all fretting about their tiny human transitioning to a new era of life and education. I am one of them, preparing to send my son into public school, posing him with a little chalkboard full of milestones and photo-ready for social media.
We worry about drop-off, about a room of new faces, about food and meeting metrics and goals and being ahead or behind. Parents have worried about things like this from the beginning of local schooling.
The difference, of course, is that the parents of today have something else, something worse, to fear.
Meant to reassure
At “back to school night” for my son’s new school, after being screened and confirmed as a parent, I walked through metal detectors. I was told about the school’s locked door policy. An administrator kindly explained all the security measures in place. They were meant to be reassuring.
But as someone who experienced a free range childhood in a small city, this all felt foreign — obvious and necessary, but foreign nonetheless. It felt wrong. Kindergarten should not be like this.
The school shooting at Columbine happened in April 1999, when I was a sophomore in high school. I remember the staff at our school worrying about guns, but mostly it was a kind of joke — something so horrifying and outside the norm that we could not even begin to process it with maturity. No one thought that Columbine would be a harbinger of decades of loss and violence.
In the ensuing 24 years, according to the Center for Homeland Defense and Security, there have been at least 304 fatal school shootings — with 118 active shooter incidents at K-12 schools. Over the years, we have lost hundreds of kids and traumatized thousands.
In 2023 alone, there have been 198 shooting incidents at K-12 schools, six of which involved active shooters. Private schools are not immune, daycare centers are not immune. At least ten children have been killed this year.
The anxiety about this is not limited to school grounds, either. Almost 42 million Americans are estimated to have lived within one mile of a mass shooting since 2014. Gunshots remained the leading cause of death among children in the US.
Choosing to trust
I keep in mind that I’m — at most — two degrees removed from some of the victims in Uvalde. I know people who are friends with those parents. Those parents who, like me, were more worried about their children having all their supplies than they were that a gunman might find them.
I have to trust that my son will be okay. I have to trust that the school’s security measures will suffice. Otherwise, I would be homeschooling him in a bunker. But the reality is what it is — and whether I like it or not, I have to change my own expectations of what “going to school” means now. My children will never have the free-range childhood I enjoyed.
Last year, when my son’s preschool practiced an active-shooter drill, so many of the parents were incensed. The kids were too young, they argued, to understand what was happening. But my son, after we spoke to him, understood enough.
“We have to practice in case a stranger comes to hurt us,” he said, and my heart broke into a million pieces.
I want his first day of Kindergarten to be pure — to be innocent and wondrous and nerve-wrecking for all the right reasons. I want the anxiety to be about making new friends and reading, and whether or not the school lunch is better than his packed meal.
A successful day
I’ve been reading all these guides on having a successful First Day. Remain calm, talk out your game plan, use routines to find comfort, and practice anything you’re not sure about — all advice that would be useful in a shooting too, I cannot help but think.
My son is starting kindergarten, as are four million other tiny Americans. For so many of us first-timers, it’s an entry into a whole new world. I’m not ready, I’m not. I will always worry.
“Being a parent means never relaxing,” my neighbor told me the other day. I have been thinking about this, and how utterly and devastatingly true it is, especially in our country.
First days are never easy. Going to school can be terrifying.
Adriana E. Ramírez, author of “Dead Boys,” is a columnist and InReview editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: aramirez@post-gazette.com. Her previous article was “Bringing Pittsburgh history to life.”
First Published: August 31, 2023, 10:05 p.m.