Despite my better judgement, I have been reading The Washington Post news articles and comments about the shooting in Michigan. People keep asking why the school didn’t do more. I wish the answers were simple. This is not a day I am supposed to post, and you probably do not want to know.

My husband has repeatedly commented that I “dodged a bullet” when I retired in 2019, months before the pandemic. I wish it had been that clearcut: good then bad, Before then After. I wish that before the pandemic, my duties as a high school teacher had never required actions I found awkward or dangerous. 

Students threw chairs at the wall (twice) and a padlock at me (once), they yelled at me and at classmates, fell asleep in their chair from lack of sleep and drug overdose. Kids worked long and often illegal hours to support family or pay their own dental bills, and parents called them from school to put in a shift during school hours, which violates state laws. Poverty was the overarching threat to their education, but there was no escape for kids from more affluent homes: One boy put hashmarks on my whiteboard for six weeks. I did not ask him why until he came in one morning and gravely erased them all: six weeks sober. A homeless girl who was welcome elsewhere was sleeping on dirt in a backyard shed in order to protect her mentally ill mother she refused to leave alone. It was a bad choice, but a compassionate and loving one.

A girl told me her Senior English Honors teacher thought she was stupid. I thought the student was exaggerating until that teacher stood in the hall and told me most of his students were not up to the work he was assigning and that particular girl was “stupid.” I’d taught them the year before and told him he was wrong about all of them. SAT scores eventually made clear how very wrong he was when that “stupid” girl out-performed her peers. Another teacher transferred a student out of his Honors class, despite my caution not to allow it. The boy was without doubt the smartest person in the building (in the building) and would complete C work whether it was Calculous or remedial English. I used to call such students 60%ers, because despite their abilities, they tended to complete only the minimum of what was required. There were plenty of stories like that which frustrated me as a teacher. I loved teaching and cried for my kids.  

Teachers are not mindreaders, and often we are not smarter than our students. We work for a modest salary, diminished retirement, and dwindling respect. And even with administrators who disrespect those of us who continue teaching instead of “working our way up” to non-teaching jobs.

Mostly I heard from students, and I was trying to show them they were stronger and more capable and had more options than they knew. I got chewed out more than once by adults.

When I passed a teacher in the halls using the term “raghead” in reference to Muslims, I backed up and suggested forcefully that the term was rude and should not be used within student hearing. The man screamed at me, accusing me of all sorts of things, on and on, and did not stop. I ran to my classroom, locked the door behind me and sat crying in my chair.

A substitute teacher announced that teaching The Bluest Eye was not appropriate. Ah, but my students did not all live pretty lives. I began teaching the novel when I understood how often their lives were not pretty at all.

The few parents who yelled or threatened me were always concerned about a grade. Parents sometimes thanked me. Students sometimes thanked me. Students sometimes came back years later to thank me. One boy apologized for being a “pest” in my class and did not believe when I laughed and said he never was.

On the other hand, I was sometimes blamed for choices I had no part in making. I did not always have a choice. I will not recount all the times I failed to do what I should have, or did not properly understand what my choices might be. Guilty.

In my first years teaching English, a vice principal asked me to create an entire remote curriculum so that a student could be moved out of the school. He was violent, had a violent criminal history, and was expected to be institutionalized soon, but the only way he could be expelled was with an alternative education opportunity in place. This was before online education existed—yes, that far back. I was young at the time, and naive enough to put in hours to create a distanced version of my classroom curriculum on my own time and without compensation. Maybe it’s plain stupid that I did this more than once. 

During those same early years, when I asked a girl why she’d missed my class, she lifted her bangs to show me the bruises that her father had left on her face. Counseling said they “were aware.” A senior boy backed his younger girlfriend against a wall and continued threatening her as she sank to the ground. I could not get him to stop and had to run for help. A girl came to me and confessed that she knew her boyfriend was taking steroids. I reported this but the VP insisted no one was using steroids at the school. (Ten years later that same boy later told me he’d used.)

Time passed, rules and my responsibilities became clearer to me. 

As a mandatory reporter, I was in the awkward position of being legally required to report any suspected danger concerning students to authorities. Most often this concerned self harm. Several times this was about abusive parents. 

If I suspected that a child was at risk to themself or others, I had to respond—note that I did not need to be correct in my suspicions, and I was not supposed to investigate. That was not my responsibility. It was the job of others to follow up and determine whether my suspicions were accurate. As a mandatory reporter, I was required to inform my principal. The principal always told me to contact the police and Children’s Services. The state department responsible for protecting children who might be at risk was closed on weekends. 

Once, after leaving a message on Saturday morning, I heard back Tuesday evening. Telling the police was also a problem, since that meant, in my small community, someone with a high school diploma might (or not) investigate but everyone would know who and why. I did what I could. I followed protocols so far as I was able.

I called only my principal and parents, but not the police, when I was worried about a boy who emailed he’d held a knife all night. That boy, who had been someone I regarded as a friend, never forgave me, but I know from social media that he is a father himself and I wonder if he understands and forgives my concern now. 

I’d tried reporting a father based on personal observations and got no where. The boy overheard saying in the school library that his father had “beat shit” out of him? After I finally got Child Services to investigate, the boy came to me and asked if I had been the one to turn in his dad. I could have lied because the process was supposed to be anonymous. I hesitated for only an instant before confessing the truth: “I was worried about you.” He said he’d been joking, but we had not got along well before and we did after. 

A high school junior revealed, entirely unnecessarily in a written assignment that he had threatened his parents with suicide if they did not let him have a gun. They caved and he was quite pleased with himself about getting his way. When I brought this to the attention of an administrator, nothing happened because the administrator thought the boy was “sweet.” I did not allow writing about weaponry in my classroom, but admin thought I should let it go. [“No sex, guns, alcohol, time-travel, dismemberment, Ninja Turtles, or swords” was the half-joking mantra I spewed.] That was when I understood what I was up against. He was a School Board member’s son, after all. Later he washed out of the military. No surprise there either. 

When I became aware that a student had repeatedly bragged about carrying weapons at all times, I immediately informed my admin. (He had spoken and written about crying a knife and a concealed carry though he was under 18 in an essay assignment, from a stack I began reading after school.) The student was pulled from participating in an athletic event, and his backpack was searched with his permission. Nothing was found and the student did not easily forgive me for “embarrassing” him. But we all did what we did out of reasonable caution. 

People have no idea how difficult it is to respond in the way people wish school officials in Michigan had responded. In hindsight, sure, but… Search and seizure cannot be done without recourse to law. We cannot even pass more restrictive gun control laws—however do we think they could have searched this boy and confiscated a weapon without someone’s permission? 

I taught for 40 years, and saw kids expelled for bringing a gun to school, sniffer dogs used to locate drugs in lockers, additional counselors brought to my building because classmates were traumatized by accidental deaths or suicide. It would be nice if I could have snapped my fingers and eliminated all threats and threatening students, but this is America. We can’t enforce nationwide masking or reasonable gun control most of us want, let alone expel a potential threat just because it would be a reasonable precaution.