It was a Friday in December, just like any other. Most of us were already thinking about the weekend, and all the Christmas and Hanukkah shopping we still hadn’t done. Our kids were fidgeting in their classrooms, feeling antsy at the end of the week, wishing the holidays would hurry up and arrive. And they did arrive, for most of us. But not for Newtown, Conn. Not for Sandy Hook Elementary School.
The mental image of 20 school kids in body bags is hard to shake for anyone. But if you’re a parent, it seizes your stomach and rises up from your gut, tangled with every fear for your children that you’ve ever managed to push back down. When I first heard the news on the radio, I had to fight the urge to drive to my daughter’s school. To do what, I have no idea. Stare at the building? Guard the door? Burst into her classroom and wrap my arms around her?
Now the memory is already starting to fade. There are 20 tiny coffins in the frozen ground, and the smiling, angelic faces, all frozen in time, no longer appear on the evening news. Instead, we see gray-faced men debating the Second Amendment, and NRA spokesmen calling for more guns in schools. But there’s something we should never forget. Along with those 20 children, six adults lost their lives that day for one simple reason: they worked at that school.
When the shooting started, Principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach were stepping out into the hallway after a meeting. Suddenly, the air exploded with smoke and the crackle of gunfire. They ran toward the gunman, into the spray of bullets, and lunged for his weapon. They were both killed.
Teacher Victoria Soto heard the gunshots and huddled her students into a closet, keeping herself between the gunman and her kids. She died while acting as their shield.
Several teachers barricaded their kids into storage rooms and bathrooms, leaning tables and filing cabinets against the doors. They tried to keep the sobbing children quiet, and undiscovered, while screams and gunshots rang down the halls and blared over the intercom. One little group stayed like that for hours, refusing to come out until a policeman slid his badge under the door.
No one questions that these teachers were heroes. But what everyone seems to forget is that, as extraordinary as the circumstances were, they were only doing their jobs. On that morning in December, they did exactly what they promise to do for us every single day: care for our children. They kept their promise. And some of them gave their lives.
It’s astounding that, in a culture where we venerate, idealize and practically worship childhood, we treat our teachers as second-class professionals. We underpay them and undervalue their work, and say nothing when they dip into their own paychecks to pay for school supplies. We stuff their classrooms with more and more kids, and then blame them for the lack of discipline in our schools. We force them to teach by rote to a standardized test, and then complain when the curriculum isn’t innovative or creative enough.
In most countries, teachers are respected and revered – on a par with doctors, and lawyers, and certainly politicians. They don’t have to take a bullet to be recognized as heroes. They are seen for what they are: the caretakers of our future.
Someday, I hope we catch up with the rest of the world. I hope we find a way to restore our teachers to the place in our culture that they really deserve. But in the meantime, here’s something you can do right now – today, when you walk into your child’s classroom. You can thank them.
I don’t mean thanks like you give the barista when they hand you your mocha cappuccino. I mean the kind of gratitude you would offer to the keepers of your hope, the guardians of your dreams, and the bulwark against your greatest fears. Because that’s who they are.
No matter what else happens in the course of this uncertain day, that’s the promise they make – to us, to our children, and to themselves.
That’s the promise they keep.
