'How much can we endure?': Local teachers fearful, exhausted after Uvalde massacre

May 28—Kim Schaffer knows exactly how long it would take to turn the window in the corner of her first-grade classroom into an escape route.

The New Market Elementary School teacher has practiced. She's pulled a chair up to the sill and shoved aside the rainbow-colored bins and the tub of pom-poms awarded for good behavior. She's climbed up, unhooked the latch, and pushed the screens out until — just a few seconds later — there was nothing but air between her and the playground outside.

Schaffer had left the classroom Tuesday by the time she heard the latest grim news: A gunman had entered an elementary school in Texas and opened fire. Children were dead.

Again.

She burst into tears, standing there in her kitchen. The death toll increased over the next few hours. Two fatalities became 14, then 19, then 21. The victims were fourth graders and their teachers in Uvalde, Texas.

After crying, Schaffer shifted into anger. The familiar hideous questions had begun to torment her again. If that had been her school, she wondered, would she have reacted quickly enough? She thought of the window. Would her students have made it out and gotten home?

"Some days, I'm not sure how much more I can take of this," Schaffer said. "It's not something that any teacher should have to be thinking about."

Educators across Frederick County Public Schools and throughout the U.S. are grappling with similar emotions in the wake of the Texas school shooting, the deadliest the nation has seen since 20 students and six teachers were murdered in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.

Privately, they run through mental catalogs of the closets, windows and doors in and around their classrooms. They prepare for questions from their students and ponder how to answer them — but in some cases, the questions never come.

Ed Schoder, an English teacher at Oakdale High School, said the shooting didn't come up in either of his classes on Wednesday or Thursday.

"I wonder if that might be because we're becoming numb to this conversation," Schoder said.

At lunchtime this week, when the kids were out of earshot, staff members discussed it among themselves. They leaned on each other.

And after they made it through the day, they'd sit alone in the quiet of an empty classroom or an afternoon commute. They'd imagine.

"We hope we would all rise to the occasion," said Jami Campbell, a career and technology teacher at Catoctin High School.

But there are so many unknowns, several teachers said.

FCPS educators are trained in a response method called "Avoid, Deny, Defend," which instructs teachers and students to run away from the danger, create barriers to slow down an attacker and, if necessary, fight back.

District Security and Emergency Management Supervisor Scott Blundell acknowledged that the specifics of educators' response in a crisis would come down to split-second decision making.

"A lot of it has been left to our imaginations," Schoder said.

There are some things teachers can "pre-stage," Blundell said, and the district encourages them to do so. They can place file cabinets or desks strategically near a door. They can take a different route in and out of the school each day until they've familiarized themselves with the layout.

The preparation is important, said Frederick County Teachers Association President Missy Dirks. But it can be traumatic in its own right, she added — especially for people who didn't sign up to be "combat-trained."

Once, Schaffer recalled, school resource officers took the New Market Elementary staff on a tour of their building, looking for hiding spots they may not have thought of. "You shouldn't be able to be beat on your own turf," she remembers being told.

Sometimes, the staff is invited to participate in a voluntary exercise in which law enforcement officers fire blanks from a main thoroughfare of the school, so teachers can stand in their classroom and hear what it sounds like, Blundell said.

Ronnie Beard, a social studies teacher at Oakdale High, draws on his time as an employee at Fort Detrick. He keeps his eye out for a primary, secondary and tertiary exit, he said. It's been drilled into his mind.

He felt prepared, he said this week. But he also felt angry and exhausted.

This happens every year, Beard said, exasperation ringing in his voice. Without fail. He wanted something to change.

"How long can I stay in this profession?" Beard wondered aloud. "How much can we endure? ... What is the breaking point?"

Heather Murray, a fifth grade teacher at Butterfly Ridge Elementary School, said she was tired, too. Too tired, in a way, to process the week's events.

"It's almost like your emotions are just depleted," Murray said.

For Campbell, the Catoctin teacher, the Uvalde shooting conjured up memories of a foiled mass casualty plot against the high school back in 2017.

The parents of then-18-year-old Nicole Cevario, a Catoctin student, reported their daughter when they found a journal in which she'd outlined detailed plans to become "the first real female school shooter," the News-Post has reported.

The Frederick County Sheriff's Office later found a shotgun, ammunition and explosives in Cevario's closet. Her plans included details she'd gleaned from a conversation with Catoctin's school resource officer under the guise of a school project.

Even five years later, Campbell said, some of the staff at the high school are haunted by the incident.

"We're a little raw," she said. "Still."

Teachers are deeply grateful to Cevario's parents for intervening, Campbell said. But the event reinforced worries that they wouldn't be able to spot a potentially dangerous student before it was too late.

Ballooning class sizes add to that worry, Beard said.

"It's hard to see red flags when you have 30 or 35 kids in a class," he said. "They can easily weave in and out of participating and not participating. They can toe that line."

But Beard and his colleagues can't do much about class sizes. They don't really have power over school security policies or firearms regulations or access to mental health care or any of the other myriad solutions suggested in the national conversation every time children die at school.

Instead, they rely on the strength of their coworkers and their families. They look forward to summer break, and they try their best to focus on what they can control.

Next year, Schaffer said, she'll use a jar of marbles instead of a tub of pom-poms to reward her 6- and 7-year-olds.

Pom-poms wouldn't be of any use against an attacker.

She's going to start texting her high-school daughter "I love you" after she boards the bus each day.

Returning to the classroom after Tuesday's news wasn't difficult, Schaffer said. Not at all. It's easy, and natural, and reaffirming, to be around her students, she said.

"It's watching them leave, go out the door. Getting in my car, driving home, hearing it on the news," she said. "That's the time that's hardest."

She feels like there's a new piece of her identity as an educator, one that didn't exist when she entered the field 24 years ago.

"We do our lesson planning, we follow the curriculum, we're doing our grading — all of those things," Schaffer said. "But there it is, constantly, in the back of your head.

"What if? What if?"

Follow Jillian Atelsek on Twitter: @jillian_atelsek