Worries cloud return to school

My children are going back to school. They are both in high school now and I don't understand how time works. Just two weeks ago I saw a glimpse of this when I attended, over the course of two days, my high school reunion and an all-alumni reunion of my alma mater. I'm not one who gets misty-eyed for the past, but there is one bit of innocence I do miss about my teen years. For all its angst, I never feared being shot at school. My husband is quite a bit younger than me and went to school in the 1990s in upstate New York, near an Army base notorious for a lot of gang activity. He was shot at during school one day. His classmates were later jailed for murdering a young girl in their school. He fled the state. Then everybody knew words like Columbine. The next decade we were parents. There were more school shootings. We fled our lovely Columbus suburb to live on the shore of Lake Erie, in a town of 10,000, to raise our kids in a tiny school district where we knew our neighbors and thought that seemed … safer. We had just moved in when I heard of a place called Sandy Hook. I really want to think "ah, kids are kids. Growing up is growing up. The same issues are there, right? Beneath the superficial differences?" But it goes beyond technology. It goes beyond a change in music, or cultural habits. I stopped lying to myself the day I realized that in our day we had class superlatives like "most likely to succeed" or "most popular" and while my children could easily tell you who those classmates were, they also could tell you, by middle school, who would be "the kid most likely to bring a gun to school." Our school district just spent more than half a million dollars installing a geofence so police dispatchers can pinpoint 911 calls from inside the buildings, access a phalanx of cameras, remotely lock doors and give officers instant details on where the shooter or shooters, plural, are located. All the staff will have the ability to throw the building into lockdown if they see someone with a weapon coming. There are strategically placed security buttons around the school for that purpose. They will lock all the doors, sound the alarms and set off strobe lights to let everybody know to evacuate or barricade themselves in their classrooms. It's cutting edge. It could save lives. And it's all for one reason — in case a shooter comes. I was there the night the school board decided in 2018 to ask voters for a safety and security levy. Years before, school officials and police representatives from our small town traveled to Columbus to speak on behalf of the needs of schools for such funds. When it came up that night in 2018, we all filed out in the cold and held candles in the dark in remembrance for the victims of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. It had just happened a few days before, and it was what prompted the levy talk. It later passed, and part of it paid for the upgrades that will be protecting the school my daughter will be attending in just a few days. Part of me is grateful she is in a safer building. Part of me is sick to my core that she now attends school in a building designed with much more safety precautions than any building I've ever worked in, including federal and state government facilities on military installations. Ninety percent of me hates people and just about 100 percent of me is thoroughly disgusted with our elected leadership for abdicating any responsibility of commonsense gun reform in this country and hoisting this problem onto the backs of children, teachers or schools at all. And here's the thing: We are the lucky ones. My kid's school is the first in all of Ohio to have that technology installed. Our police department is the first in the state to have it installed. Nobody wants it to ever be used, of course. It's like insurance for every kind of catastrophe. So we can have "peace of mind." In the event of the unthinkable happening, we need to have this because we know horrible things can happen. It's rare, but it can be deadly, so just in case, we're going to be ready. It's probably the same reason why so many fellow Americans have guns we never use or touch. Because so many of our fellow Americans have guns. And it's back to school season here in the land of the free. Contact Chronicle-Telegram columnist Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.