Ready to be furious out of your mind on so many levels?
Last week in Virginia, Stafford County Middle School held a lockdown drill to give students practice responding to an active shooter. During the drill, students are required to take shelter in the nearest bathroom or locker room.
But administrators didn’t know what to do with one student, a transgender girl. So while the other students took shelter, as they would during an active shooter situation, the girl was told to sit first in the gym while teachers discussed their decision, then in the locker room hallway away from the other students.
“The student was forced to watch the adults charged with her care, debate the safest place (for the other students) to have her shelter,” Equality Stafford wrote. “During this debate, she was instructed to sit in the gym with a teacher until the drill was complete, away from her peers and identified as different. After some additional debate, she was made to sit in the locker room hall way [sic], by the door away from her peers.”
Equality Stafford slammed the school’s response, noting that they essentially treated the student as a danger to the other students.
“During an event that prepares children to survive an attack by actual assailants, she was treated as if she was so much of a danger to peers that she was left exposed and vulnerable,” they wrote.
Stafford County Middle School’s spokesperson Sherrie Johnson issued a statement following outcry over the school’s actions.
“The new superintendent has requested a review of all protocols and procedures to ensure that all children are treated with dignity and respect,” said Johnson. “We take such matters very seriously and they will be addressed. The welfare of all students is of the utmost importance for SCPS.”
We are living in a world so terrifying that children have to rehearse where they’d go in case of a school shooter, and the faculty can’t respect a transgender girl enough to quickly assign her a designated “safe” place with her peers? Shameful and scary.
If there’s any sort of thing where bathrooms and locker rooms are the safe spaces (I remember doing that for tornado drills), then you’re gonna have boys in the girls room and vice versa. Why is it suddenly a big deal when the kid’s trans?
Transgender student barred from shelter during Virginia school’s mass shooter drill
Skorpio's Art 