It's Been Said....

  Quiet Rooms This blog post is dedicated to the injured survivors of the mass school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Little has been published thus far about them. I ask everyone to understand the survivors warrant our attention, too. Hospitals have many rooms including what physicians call quiet rooms.  A New England Journal of Medicine article titled The Quiet Room was authored and published November 15, 2017 by Peter Masiakos, M.D. and Cornelia Griggs, M.D. Their essay details what it’s like for physicians when they take loved ones aside to inform them their child has died. It was gut-wrenching to read: “We introduce ourselves as the doctor who took care of their child. We take a deep breath, look into their eyes, and quickly break the devastating news — there is no reason to delay. What follows is the visceral, piercing shriek of a mother’s wailing, ‘Please God, not my baby!’ ” But it doesn’t end there: “We walk away from the encounter, our stom...

  Relax folks. I'm not advocating what the title of this blog implies. Far from it, in fact. Exactly the opposite, in fact. It's meant to be tongue in cheek, in fact. It's meant to be snark, in fact. It's also meant to help drive home a serious point about something that seems to pop up in our society following virtually every mass school shooting: That there's one helluva lot more to these two issues than simply placing a gun and a bible in a teacher's hands. So, that being said, and in that context, let's end this discussion regarding arming teachers and putting God back in schools once and for all, shall we? Sorry....rhetorical. Truth be known, these two issues are heating up....again. So, this blog post may be in vain, but all y'all can't blame a guy for trying, right?! With President Biden's recent executive actions addressing the gun violence epidemic in this country, the debate on gun reform (I prefer this label rather than gun control) an...

School Safety Is An Enigma..... School safety doesn’t necessarily translate into schools being safe….or as safe as they can be. How is that an enigma, you ask? Well, schools are supposed to be safe learning environments, but engaging in school safety activities often times can be like dragging a horse to water, but getting that horse to drink? Well, that's the school safety enigma. In other words, getting schools to do anything at all in school safety other than mandated drills including active shooter drills, ain't easy by any stretch of the imagination. For example, listen to  Ready As You'll Never Be , and you’ll see what I mean. If you'd like to read the transcript instead of listening to it, there's a link to same on the page. This interview is with two Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSD) teachers who appear to believe they were as ready as possible for an active shooter in their school.  But were they, really? These teachers based their perceptions of r...