CMS teacher: Let’s talk about what these ‘Go Bags’ are really for | Opinion
The “Go Bags” Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools teachers received this year are not to “keep children safe.“ They are to treat gunshot wounds.
I am an elementary school teacher in CMS and a military veteran, and I feel it is so wrong that I need a supply bag to treat gunshot wounds — in children.
School should be a safe place. A home away from home. It should not be a battlefield where tourniquets are needed to keep a child alive.
Don’t get me wrong. The equipment and training we’ve received is top-notch. The scary part is that it is needed.
Mass shootings have become an epidemic in the United States; there have been over 400 this year alone. I wonder not if, but when, my students and I will be next. My classroom is in a permanent mobile unit. Bullets would pass right through the walls.
Field trauma care has been upgraded since my last CMS training last year, and upgraded since I was in the military. Last year at this time, we were advised to stick a menstrual pad over a bullet wound in the chest. This year, our Go Bags contain an adhesive patch made for this purpose. We had great video training that showed us how to apply the airtight patch to both the entrance and exit wound of the chest.
My Go-Bag also has these awesome granules to pour into a severe wound to keep a person from bleeding to death. This medical advancement didn’t even exist when I was in the military 30 years ago. I don’t know what’s more amazing — the medical advancement or the fact that I need trauma supplies in a school setting.
I’m a mother too. I’m using frank, real and accurate language because I know what is at stake: the lives of your children and my children.
I look at the sweet faces of the children I teach every day and I cannot fully imagine how the teenage shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut used a military-style AR-15 rifle in 2012 to massacre 20 kindergartners and six adults. On May 24, 2022 in Uvalde, Texas an 18-year-old shooter killed 19 fourth grade students and two teachers at Robb Elementary, and injured 17 others.
I have so many personal connections to devastating mass shootings in the U.S. My oldest child is working her first job in Colorado, 27 minutes from Columbine High School where 12 students and one teacher were killed in 1999 in what was then the deadliest school shooting in the U.S. My youngest child is a freshman at Virginia Tech, where 32 students and faculty were killed in a 2007 mass shooting. One victim was a holocaust survivor. And, I lived my Navy life in Virginia Beach, where a shooter killed 12 people in 2019 at a municipal center. I drove past that building every day on my way to work.
Just a few months ago, a 4-year-old student at my current school witnessed a shooting at a local Cracker Barrel. A man was carrying a firearm that accidentally discharged inside the restaurant. My student and her family ran for their lives and were traumatized.
I grew up in a gun-owning family and once had my own concealed carry permit. I also grew up with values that include concern for others in my community. I am deeply concerned about the lives of the children I serve as a teacher. Please vote. Vote for politicians who value the lives of your children and grandchildren over guns, because right now, a teen can easily purchase deadly firearms and shoot up my classroom.