Of course you didn’t have to see the gunman or hear the gunshots to be traumatized by what happened. Just knowing a madman breached your school is enough to send anyone into distress. What I was trying to say, what I was desperate to get across to school officials, was that my students were likely going to be more affected by the tragedy than many others because of what they’d been witness to, and that we, as adults, needed to take whatever extra measures were necessary to help them to feel safe as they acclimated back into school.
When the principal didn’t seem to understand the reasons for my concerns, I decided to go to the superintendent with my proposal. My students were in a unique position, I explained. They had been on the front lines of the vicious attack on our school. They came woefully close to losing their young lives. Had we not somehow squeezed into that unlikeliest of hiding spots, that three-by-four-foot bathroom, we would almost certainly have died. They felt the breath of death as the killer darkened our first-grade corridor. They heard the resonance of carnage, the desperate cries of the victims just before they were murdered in cold blood. At six and seven years old, they knew what it was to be in the presence of evil. How many people ever experience what they did? Because I had, I was keenly aware of how extraordinarily fragile they were, how tenuous their sense of well-being was, how frightening the world looked to them. Several times a day some student asked: “Miss Roig, what are we going to do if another bad guy comes to get us?” They asked because they understood that we shouldn’t have survived the first time and the odds of us escaping with our lives again, especially with no place to hide, were slim to none.
I appreciated that the district was providing counselors and extra security in our new school, but I thought more could be done to reassure those who had been in close proximity to the massacre. My students needed tangible evidence that everything humanly possible was being done to ensure their safety. At the very least, they needed to know we had a ladder that we could toss out the window and climb down as reassurance that, if we were ever to be faced with a similar situation, which I realized was unlikely, we had some means of escape.
The district was doing enough, the superintendent said.
“I respectfully disagree,” I said.
Where do I go from here? I wondered.
CHOOSING TO OVERCOME
“I have never felt that anything really mattered but the satisfaction of knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed, and had done the very best you could.”
—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
The Questions I Could Answer
Every day when we walked into our new school we discovered more gifts. They came from people around the world—kind people who wanted to do something to help our community heal. The outpouring was so overwhelming that a town official was charged with overseeing the sorting and cataloging of all the things sent by well-wishers. The numbers were staggering. Hundreds of thousands of cards and letters, toys, and monetary donations poured in.
According to the local newspaper, in that first week alone, town officials inventoried 63,780 teddy bears, 636 boxes of toys, 2,200 boxes of school supplies, as well as bicycles and backpacks and cookies and cupcakes and boxes and boxes of tissues. It took an army of nearly six hundred volunteers just to sort the iTunes and Starbucks gift cards.
My class received stuffed animals in every size and color, and art supplies, and books by the dozens, and our own toy therapy dogs. Knowing we were in others’ thoughts and prayers, that complete strangers cared about us and our town, provided a welcome reprieve in what continued to be very challenging times.
My wounded students deserved every moment of happiness they could get. But about two weeks in, as the gifts kept coming, it struck me that perhaps I was missing the opportunity to reinforce a very important life lesson for my first-graders. The lesson that teaches, while it is wonderful to receive, it feels even better to give. So many people had given of themselves to us and I thought it was our social responsibility to pay the kindness forward. We just needed to find a way to do it.
Up to that point, I had continued to obsess over the “Why?” of what happened. The question was always met with silence because, of course, there was no answer, and that had only fueled my anger and frustration. That day, though, I realized I could continue to torture myself by asking the unanswerable, or give myself permission to refocus on questions that could be answered. And I could share that mission with my students. Together we had witnessed great evil and now we were being showered with goodness. In was within our power to choose which to focus on. Even though we couldn’t answer why, we could answer things such as: How do we find good after evil? How do we get our control back? How do we persevere in a way that will honor the friends we have lost? The answer was the same to all of the questions: by giving.
“I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver,” Maya Angelou wrote. Giving was a way to channel our grief, and perhaps even give us the solace we were seeking. By focusing on someone else’s needs, rather than our own sadness, the very least that could happen was we would do some good in the world. But who would we help? And how?
For my entire career, I tried to incorporate aspects of a social curriculum into my classwork. Solid test scores and strong scholastic skills are crucial for the success of every student, but teaching youngsters how to interact and empathize with one another, to feel good about themselves and their relationships, and giving them the tools to be socially aware and emotionally intelligent is every bit as important. The foundation of a social curriculum is teaching lessons that lead to a greater good, whether it is in the classroom, or the school, or the community, or the world. What better lesson than one that teaches the importance of giving? I thought.
And so one afternoon I brought a large box a friend of mine had mailed to my class and I placed it in front of them. “This box is filled with things for us to use today during recess,” I said, pulling out puzzles and games and coloring books and colorful markers. Their eyes grew wide at the prospect of playing with their newest gifts. “Do you know why someone sent this to us?” I asked. Their hands shot up. “Because they wanted us to be happy,” one of the students said. “They wanted to be nice,” another student said. “They wanted us to have fun at recess,” said a third child. “You are all exactly right!” I said. “Someone did this for us, for all of those reasons. In life, when someone does something nice for you, you have to do something nice for someone else, and that is what we are going to do!”
At that point, I had a “lightbulb moment.” In first grade, that’s what we call it when an idea finally clicks. “I’ve got it!” I said. “We are going to find a class somewhere in the United States and we are going to make them feel the way we do right now. We’re going to make them feel happy.”
Now their eyes got even wider with excitement. They were squealing with anticipation. “Who are we going to help?” they asked. “How are we going to help them?” “When are we going to start?”
I marveled at the benevolence of my students. They were more excited at the prospect of giving to others than the gifts they had just received. They got right down to work. For the next week, we focused on the idea of giving. I found short video clips of readings from the PBS children’s series Reading Rainbow and read them stories from books with giving themes. Boxes for Katje, The Berenstain Bears: Kindness Counts, and, of course, The Giving Tree. That was their favorite.
“I don’t need very much now,” said the boy, “just a quiet place to sit and rest. I am very tired.”
“Well,” said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could, “well, an old stump is good for sitting and resting. Come, Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest.”
“And the boy did. And the tree was happy.”
We had daily conversations about the meaning of benevolence and generosity and gratitude and why it was so important to help our fellow
man. At the same time, after class, I searched the Internet for ideas on how we might go about developing our project. It had to be an authentic experience, one in which we could connect with the receiving class so my students could see firsthand the impact of their giving.
Around that time, a group from Tennessee visited our school to make a donation and do whatever they could to help the community. One of them was a teacher. I told her about our idea and she gave me the name of a new teacher in her school whose class had many needs.
I contacted that teacher and explained what we wanted to do. Was there something we could do for her class? Something they needed? The teacher responded that at the top of her wish list was an interactive whiteboard, which would allow her to access the Internet on a computer and share it on the whiteboard with the whole class.
The next day, I shared the exciting news that we had a recipient for our giving project. My students were beside themselves with excitement. I showed them the state of Tennessee on the map in our classroom and explained how the whiteboard would help the receiving class with their daily lessons. They got right down to work, drawing handmade cards to go with our gift, which we purchased using donations that had been sent to us. Ours was the first class to reach out to another class and say, “What do you need? How can we help you?”
My students wanted to feel better, and my job as their teacher was to give them the opportunity to turn that terrible tragedy into something positive. When they seized the opportunity—when they chose that glimmer of hope—was when I knew that the shooting was not going to define them or me. I didn’t know how long it would take, but I knew we would eventually be okay.
That was a first step on our long path to healing.
Focusing on the Positive
Our community lost its equilibrium after the massacre. The tragedy was so enormous, so incomprehensible, so outside the realm of normality that we were rocked off balance. When your world feels so out of control, you tend to grab what little control you still have. For me, it was my classroom. Throughout January, I continued to advocate for ways to help my students feel safer at school. They still worried about having no place to hide in our classrom. They jumped at every unfamiliar sound. They needed a chaperone (my mom) to take them to the bathroom, or to the office, or anywhere else outside of our classroom, because what if a bad guy was out in the hallway shooting at people again? In many cases, I was the only person a student felt comfortable with besides their parents. The month was almost over and one of my students still refused to come to school without her mother because she felt so vulnerable with no place to take cover in our new room. I couldn’t blame her. When the mom went to the administration to inquire about a plan to make her daughter feel safer, she was told, “Miss Roig has good instincts. She will protect the students.”
I was unhappy to hear the response. I’d been able to protect my students at Sandy Hook because we at least had a place to get away from the danger. In the new classroom, there was nowhere for us to hide and no way out of our room except for the door leading into the hallway. Going out that way would have meant certain death in our old school. My students knew that. That’s why I’d asked for a ladder for the window, as reassurance that we could get away if we had to.
For weeks, I’d been trying to get the superintendent to understand my logic, but all of my suggestions were rejected. I realized that the resistance wasn’t about district resources when I told her I’d found someone who was willing to donate and install a new classroom door and she still refused, saying a new door wouldn’t meet code or match the other doors in the school. When I wanted to use some of the donations we’d received to purchase the fireman’s ladder, she said they were unsafe for small children. But I had to wonder: Less safe than being trapped in a room with no way to evade a madman intent on killing us? I explained that I realized it was unlikely we would ever have to use the ladder, that that wasn’t the point. (Of course, if someone had predicted what had already happened to us, we would have called them crazy. And there is the saying that lightning never strikes twice.) It wasn’t about the ladder, I said. It was about easing my student’s minds.
“We have done everything to make the school safe,” she said.
None of it made sense to me. Sometimes it felt as though people just didn’t get it, that they had somehow misinterpreted what it was I was trying to do. How could I make them understand that those few relatively minor things would give my students and their parents a little peace of mind? Didn’t they deserve that?
I certainly wasn’t going to retreat, not when my students were still beleaguered by constant thoughts of a monster that they knew was real. Why wasn’t I being trusted to know what was best for them? Why had our needs been repeatedly dismissed with the pronouncement that enough had been done? If that were true, if enough had been done, I wouldn’t have had sixteen stressed-out first-graders who were so distracted by fear that they couldn’t get through a day without tearful outbursts.
I convinced myself that the superintendent would eventually come around. How could she not? In the meantime, I did my best to focus on positive things that were happening.
I’d never seen my students as happy as they were when they were helping the class in Tennessee to purchase the interactive whiteboard. Seeing those genuine first-grade smiles again was a sight for sore eyes. Our giving project had provided them with a few hours of happiness during an otherwise terrifically demanding time for all of us. Their joy from giving was palpable and, just as I had hoped, the students from Tennessee chose to reciprocate by paying it forward.
I got to thinking. We, as a society, are so driven to accumulate possessions and wealth that we often forget about how good it feels to give, to share our own goodness with others. The act of giving is so powerful. What better example of that than the joy it brought my first-graders, even during a chapter in their lives that was shrouded in deep sorrow and unhappiness? The message had caught on with the class in Tennessee, so why not share it in a bigger way? Why not invite students all over the country to experience the pleasure of giving the way we did? Why not grow a social movement to teach schoolchildren kindness and empathy, not by just talking about it, but by living it, in the way my first-graders had?
After school one night I jotted down some ideas on a slip of paper. The concept of students giving to students could be featured on a website and work the way our class project had. We had reached out and asked the school in Tennessee what we could do to help them, and then we’d used resources that were donated to us to fulfill their need. The premise of a website could be the same: donors would contribute to the site, and classes could pay for needs posted by other classes using those donations.
I surfed the Web to see if there was anything out there like it, certain that someone was ahead of me, but there was nothing to be found. That gave me the green light to share my idea with other teachers. I called teachers who were friends to solicit their thoughts. During each call I explained the concept and how it might impact the way our students learned to care about one another. I made several calls a night, and everyone I spoke with was really receptive. By the time I was finished making calls, fourteen teachers were on board and couldn’t wait to get started, and each had promised to recruit another teacher or sponsor to help get the program off the ground.
At my next therapy session, I shared with Dr. Purcell that I was ready to move in a different direction in my healing. “Thank you for all of your help,” I said. “I appreciate everything you have done for me. I’ve learned so much. But I truly think that, going forward, my healing needs to be action, doing something.” I explained about the nonprofit and the goal of it, “to help children to learn to care by being actively engaged in caring about others,” and how working toward something so positive had made me feel better than I had in weeks. “I really think throwing myself into this is my healing,” I said. “It makes me feel happy and hopeful and in control again.
”
Dr. Purcell gave me her blessing. She said she was a firm believer that different people needed different ways to cope with trauma. “Action is healing,” she said. That really resonated with me. Having her support was a pivotal moment in my recovery. Her belief in me was the reassurance I needed that I was on my way back from the tragedy and strong enough to travel the rest of the road without her professional guidance. We agreed that would be my last session and promised to stay in touch. When I left her office, I felt lighter. I was going to see to it that something good came from what seemed like an unredeemable tragedy.
That night I wrote in my journal.
In this tragedy, I have been confronted with an outpouring of good, hope, caring, compassion on behalf of the people in our country, which is how this idea came to me. If, after such a horrific event, we are going to choose love, caring, consideration, compassion, empathy, and hope, which I so believe we should, then we need students around our nation to have the opportunity to be a part of something that exhibits all of these. We can teach every child to care for one another by caring for others, and to have genuine interest in others by showing interest in others ourselves, and to be kind by showing them that we practice acts of kindness. We can teach every child to learn how to love by being loving. We can teach them to understand that our lives are not separate, but in fact, completely connected. When we teach kindness, caring and love, then there is no room for hate.
Everything started falling into place really quickly. I was referred to a Web designer and we drafted a mock website together. She and I became fast friends, and I asked if she’d consider being on a board of directors and she excitedly agreed. Two local businessmen, both with nonprofit experience, also accepted an invitation to join. I felt honored that such experienced and accomplished people were willing to volunteer their time to help grow a concept we all believed in.
Choosing Hope: Moving Forward from Life's Darkest Hours Page 10