My teacher was in time to barricade the door with tables and chairs, while the other hid us in the cupboards and under the desks. The alarm sounded again and again.
I just managed to write ‘I love you’ to my father and my mother.
When I started in high school, I learned quite quickly to something quite special. Something I had not expected that I should ever learn in the course of my school years. I learned to save me.
I know all the best places to hide in my various classrooms, I have scanned the rooms again and again, so I’m prepared if a gunman were ever to penetrate the extensive security precautions.
the Fear of violence has been a part of my daily life.
I know where I will find the closet or the shelf, there the best way possible can hide me.
I also know how it is to lie sandwiched together, pinned and anxious, while my friends and I are waiting to get clarified, whether the alarm means that it really is earnest this time, or whether it is even an exercise.
Thought I was going to die
Earlier this year, it was suddenly no longer only, because we had to be trained in an apocalyptic scenario and learn to follow safety procedures during a potentially skoleskyderi.
A Friday morning sounded the well-known penetrating alarm, but this time emphasised our principal over the loudspeaker that it was not an exercise. There was an active shooter at the school, he said.
The report we had never heard before, and with a was the fear that we otherwise little has accustomed us to, reality.
Meanwhile, the teacher had barricaded the door to the classroom, with stacked tables and chairs, and all light was turned off, dispersed the panic itself.
Three other students and I ran to lock us inside in a back room, where I somehow got pressed my body behind a narrow bookcase. Others hid under desks, in cupboards or behind doors.
We hid ourselves in a neighborhood, while we are terrified, listened for outside sounds. Convinced that we were the next school, which was hit by a hailstorms of bullets. Our school was the next heading.
I thought I was going to die, and managed to send two text messages to my father and my mother.
the first was: ‘There’s a shooter at my schoo (there is a person with a firearm in my skol, red.), for in my terror I managed not to get the last letter with. In the next I wrote ‘I love you’.
Away, I remember not really much more. I was out of myself of the panic, and I blacked out my eyes.
Police and security
Our school is otherwise not easy to get into. It is fenced on all sides with tall fences, around a gigantic campus for us 1600 students.
Security officials and police are on the school premises at all times, virtually around the clock. One hand on their weapon case, the other on their morning coffee.
We are a ‘closed campus’, like many other high schools in the UNITED states has been, in the wake of the many tragic violence in recent years.
This means that we can’t stroll in and out as it suits us, but must wait in a row and is identified by our brought id.
The same must parents and other visitors on school premises.
the School goes into a state of emergency
Even the smallest breach of security or suspicious persons seen in the vicinity can trigger a so-called lockdown.
This means that the school is going in a form of a state of emergency, no one can neither leave or enter in in the field, and it is in these situations, we must seek security and save us in the best way possible, as soon as possible.
When the alarm sounds for a lockdown, begins a lightning-fast thought process:
it Is an exercise, or is there a real threat? If I save me now, I can so crush me even further behind the bookshelf, when the perpetrator – or perpetrators – reach to our local. It will be more safe to run into the nearest toilet? And should I be wasting maybe precious seconds to grab my phone so I can write to my friends to hear if they are okay? Should I write to my parents, or is there not reason to make them unnecessarily afraid?
the Teachers also have different procedures for how they should behave during a possible shooting.
Depending on where they are located, when the alarm goes, they should help students to save themselves or to guide students who are stranded on the corridors, into the nearest local.
One of our teachers has even a large baseball bat, standing by his door, and has repeatedly said that she will be ready to prevent a potential perpetrator from entering.
Locked in three hours
On Friday morning, we got a message that there was an active shooter at the school, I was paralyzed by shock behind the bogskabet in 15 long minutes.
Only after a quarter of an hour we were told there wasn’t any danger anyway, but there was seen a person with a weapon in a shopping centre close to our campus, and it was this that had triggered the extensive lockdown.
Police had feared that the våbenmanden had fled into the school area.
It took three hours before we were allowed to leave our classrooms, and when we finally came out, it was to the whirring helicopters, the tv sendevogne and facilitated the parents with tears in her eyes.
the Shock of the experience was sitting in me for several days afterwards, and I had a hard time to get rid of the heavy wave of anxiety that was suddenly washed over me, an otherwise ordinary school day.
Not just something we hear about
Although it fortunately never has been any serious incidents in my school, I am nevertheless all too familiar with the consequences of the tragedies around me.
Skoleskyderierne and their victims is not just something we hear about.
My friends and I know pupils from other schools, who have lost comrades. We cry when we hear about other schools that have been hit by gunfire, whether they are a half an hour or 500 kilometers away, and we meet next victims, when we compete in sporting events against students from schools could in the area.
Maybe we also meet future perpetrators.
It turns out that the 16-year-old boy who last week killed two students at Saugus High in Santa Clarita, just an hour away from my school, was long-distance running, like myself.
I could have met him at one of the many same events, both of our schools were invited to over the last fearbet two years.
Perhaps I have.
