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Care and Feeding | Slate's parenting show

SPECIAL: Surviving a School Shooting, From a Teacher's Point of View

Care and Feeding | Slate's parenting show

Slate Audio

Society & Culture, Kids & Family, Parenting

4.41K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2018

⏱️ 30 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In an intimate conversation, three educators who survived school shootings talk to Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick about the trauma of going back to the classroom. 

For a transcript, visit Slate.com/TeacherPodcast

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey, Mom and Dad are fighting listeners. It's me, Gabe. We wanted to share something that we thought you'd be interested in, an audio story produced by my colleagues at Slate and hosted by our legal correspondent, Dahlia Lithwick. For this story, Dahlia talked with three teachers who have survived gun violence at their schools about what it was like to experience that catastrophe and what it was like to return to the classroom afterward. After you listen, share your thoughts in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.

0:23.8

There's a link to the story posted there.

0:26.0

Thanks for listening.

0:27.1

Mom and Dad are fighting.

0:27.9

We'll be back next Thursday.

0:29.9

Hello, I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and this is a special audio presentation from Slate.

0:34.3

According to the Washington Post's data on school shootings,

0:37.3

more than 215,000 students

0:40.0

have experienced gun violence since the killings at Columbine High School in 1999. And that number

0:45.4

doesn't even include teachers and other school workers. Today I'm talking with three people who

0:50.4

experienced gun violence in their school. We'll begin with Heather Martin.

0:54.5

She's currently a high school English teacher in Aurora, Colorado.

0:57.7

But in 1999, she was a senior at Columbine High School, where 13 people were shot to death.

1:03.7

Heather remembers the shooting began while she was in choir class.

1:07.0

A student ran up through the doors and just said, someone has a gun downstairs in their shooting.

1:11.3

We all kind of immediately jumped up, like, probably out of shock.

1:15.1

And the teacher yelled at us and was like, get down.

1:18.5

So we kind of sat down and then the gunfire erupted right outside the doorway.

1:23.1

So a bunch of people scattered.

1:25.3

I did not scatter.

1:26.7

I'm not really sure why I think I just was in shock and didn't want to overreact. Definitely, you know, not thinking that that could happen at my school. There's there's a chance I went outside to investigate what was happening. A friend of mine says that we went outside the door where we saw

1:46.6

Mr. Sanders take a bullet. I don't have any memory of that, but we did come back into the choir

...

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