and we were in there for about 30 or 35 minutes. we were getting texts and information that they were still looking for the shooter, and so i told the kids we would stay put until the either we heard an announcement or the s.w.a.t. team came to get us. do you feel like the training you have gone through, the drills, the emergency protocols that you have at your school, that they were the right kind of training now that you have been through this in real life? yeah. i definitely think so. they knew what to do. we knew what to do. and even still, even with that, we still have 17 casualties. 17 people who aren t going to return to their families. to me, that s totally unacceptable. on valentine s day, february 14th, we were joined by a teacher from marjorie stoneman douglas high school who told us about what it had been like that day trying to keep the kids in her class safe. since the shooting students from
there s only one person to blame here, right? the criminal, the mass murderer. but the most important thing is for us as a society to stop looking at the solution as binary, right? it s either/or. either mental illness or not mental illness. gun control or not gun control. in a world as sophisticated as ours, we talk about layered offenses, multiple things that combine that will reduce the risk to our children in particular. that s emergency protocols at schools, it s mental health access for people who are showing signs of violence. and, of course, it s making sure a teenager who cannot buy a beer is not able to buy a weapon that has no place in civilian society. it s all of the above. and i think that the white house sort of tried to make it this binary thing. it s not a binary thing. we need to reduce the risk across all verticals. for our kids, it s ridiculous at this stage. we failed them, right?
shooter and so that s how i knew that it was it was real. and then we were getting information from kids who were out there in the building. and so, you know, we tried to, you know, not listen to what is rumor, what isn t. at the very least we knew that it was real and that it was happening and we heard the sirens and the helicopters and so we knew that something was, you know, actually happening. it sounds to me like one of the things that ended up being a life saver today that may have been a mitigating factor in terms of it being a worse death toll was the training you had at school in terms of how to communicate the seriousness of the situation, knowing what to try to do in terms of keeping safe. do you feel like that training that you ve gone through, those drills, the sort of emergency protocols that you have at your school, that they were the right kind of training now that you ve been through this in real life? yeah, i definitely think so. we ve made a lot of changes with
terms of keeping safe. do you feel like that training that you ve gone through, the drills, the sort of emergency protocols that you have at your school, that they were the right kind of training, now that you ve been through this in real life? yeah, i definitely think so. we ve made a lot of changes to safety protocols this year. as led by one of our assistant principals. i think that is what helped us be so prepared. i don t think we could have been more prepared than we were today. i mean, we had we talked to every single class period that sat in front of us about what to do in this situation, in a bomb threat, in a fire drill. we went over every safety and every single teacher did that with every single, you know, class that they had until the kids were tired of hearing about it. i mean, they knew what to do, we knew what to do. and even still, even with that, we still have 17, you know, casualties, 17 people that aren t going to return to their families. and to me that s tot
family unification area where they ll take the kids and get the family members there. of course, as we know, some family members are also then going to have to be taken elsewhere for to find their child or brief or get to a hospital. and the hospitals are taking an inventory of who is coming in so that notification can go to the parents. a school this size, i m pretty confident they know how to reach people pretty quickly. your going to want to get the parents to the hospitals if they need to. and it s just it s sad and unfortunate but this is what these emergency protocols are like. brooke, a lot of times as someone who wrote the book called security mom i ll hear from mothers saying isn t it horrible that these kids have to do these active shooter trainings? the truth is when these things happen, you re very grateful that people have tested the system to try to protect lives. that s, unfortunately, the world we live in. i think back to when i was in school. it was all about doi