There are about 1,650 students that regularly attend Ukiah High School on a daily basis. 

On Friday only about 800 showed up, thanks primarily to massive social media hysteria in a small town.

My class attendance on Friday ?

1st Period – 10 out of 30

2nd Period – 19 out of 28

3rd Period – 14 out of 24

4th Period – 16 out of 32

5th Period – 11 out of 30

“There has been talk of a school shooting threatening the high school. So, don’t go to school for the rest of the week.”

On Tuesday a student created a SnapChat post that made that statement.  The comment eventually made it to a parent on Facebook and that parent somehow let it be known that the Friday before Spring Break was going to be the date of a mass shooting at the high school.  Basically a SnapChat created a rumor and that rumor spread like wildfire and this last week has been taken up by a combination of useless panic and presentations that have already been dealt with due to the shooting at Parkland in Florida.  On top of that were the usual rage posts that the tiny minority of Facebook drama fans relish creating to garner the attention of the school district.  About a dozen grown adults went on virtual rampages about the ineptitudes of administrators and teachers in not making the high school seem like a panic stricken prison that needs to be constantly drilled in the art of chaos management.  It was no win situation for the school.  If we don’t react to the hysteria then we seem like we don’t care.  If we do react to the hysteria then we perpetuate an atmosphere of reactionary fear in over-preparing for an incredibly unlikely event. 

Yes, there it is.  You can’t really say it because it makes you seem uncaring but a mass shooter event on a school campus is still insanely rare.  Not only is it insanely rare but it is actually happening less than 20 years ago.

“The U.S. Department of Education Education reports that roughly 50 million children attend public schools for roughly 180 days per year. Since Columbine, approximately 200 public school students have been shot to death while school was in session, including the incident in Parkland, Fla.  That means the statistical likelihood of any given public school student being killed by a gun, in school, on any given day since 1999 was about 1 in 614,000,000.”

Ukiah High School’s students were in danger on Friday but not from an active shooter.  There was a much greater likelihood that they would die from:

-Driving to and from school

-Catching a disease at school

-Riding a bike to school

-Participating in school athletic events

Hell, the kids were much more likely to die from playing under the Friday night lights every week in the Fall.

And they were much more likely to die from gun violence off campus than on it.

In the four weeks since Parkland we have had six separate meetings regarding active shooter situations at Ukiah High School.  We have been trained in “Run, Hide, Fight.”  We have sat down as a building and noted every potential weakness, every potential exit (including the roof), every potential situation (that we can imagine), and my classes have had three (two from me, one from admin) presentations about active shooters and lockdowns.  The results are fairly simple; we have whipped ourselves into a frenzy over an extremely unlikely event that even if it happened has so many potential variables that practicing for anything other than a lockdown would basically be an exercise in public perception control. 

I spent much of the week telling kids they would be ok.  I had to tell foreign exchange students that this isn’t really who we are; both the school shootings and the hysterical fear of the improbable were unusual situations.  I would much like to not have to go through this week again.