The past few decades have seen a tragic rise in the number of school shootings around the country. Thousands of kids have been murdered, injured, and the lifetime torture of things like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from these shootings. Another element of these shootings is that it is not just these kids who were affected by it, each day, millions of kids go to school each day and they cannot confidently say that they feel safe. This is one of the saddest feelings as a parent, sending your kid to school to further their education but you can’t even feel that they are safe.
This school year, the schools in the general area of Tampa have been receiving threats that traumatic occurrences will happen to their schools. Countless anonymous calls have been made to various schools with the threats of things like shootings, bombs, and other awful things.
None of these threats have come to fruition yet fortunately, but each time a call has been made students have to sit in lockdown, for hours on end, not knowing if the threat is real but still fearing for their safety. A recent article published by Lily Belcher at USF stated that over hundreds of threats have been made to local schools in just the first two weeks of school. The schools in the Hillsborough County area have even started to further the safety measures just in case. They have started adding security cameras, doing unplanned checks, and even using canine metal detecting devices.
“It is awful, we can only hope that one day this is all behind us and we can go to school feeling safe,” Gavin Raitt, a senior, said.
Raitt is just like all of us, we dream of one day not having any threats and shootings.
“It’s crazy, with all the schools around us getting threats, I keep thinking we will get one. I just hope we don’t and if we do I hope it is just a threat,” Aaron Wonderly, a senior, said.
These are the thoughts that students these days must deal with, it is a cruel reality, but we can only move forward and try to prevent this from happening.
