ANDERSON – After last week's school shootings in Parkland, Florida, and during a week when threats of violence at Anderson Community Schools prompted at least 150 absences Wednesday, several Anderson High School students interviewed by The Herald Bulletin indicated they've become numb to such threats.
“Like when you walk into school, it’s not something you are mindful about,” said AHS senior Sadie Mcgraw. “It’s been happening for a while, since we have been in school, it’s just kind of like, ‘Oh, yeah, it happens.’”
The 150 AHS and Highland Middle School students stayed home Wednesday after a student was overheard Tuesday threatening to bring a weapon to school during an active shooter drill. The absences constitute less than 1 percent of the combined enrollment — 3,290 — of the high school and middle school.
News of the threat had proliferated on social media, prompting an extra security presence at area schools.
But Mcgraw said she wasn’t afraid to go to school.
“A shooting can happen anywhere, you can be at the grocery store, you can go to a restaurant," she said. "So, like yesterday when people were saying they were scared ... to come to school, it didn’t reach my side of the spectrum with myself and my friends."
Junior Paige McKnight said she isn’t giving into fear.
“We can’t go through the rest of the year being afraid of something happening, because literally any day something can happen,” McKnight said.
Instead, she said, while the school administration disciplines the suspected student and increases security, it's students’ job to shut down comments before they escalate.
“You can’t take it lightly, but you can’t take it to the extent that everyone is just going to freeze and not want to do anything and not want to go anywhere,” she said.
Comments like the one that sparked increased security and absences Wednesday are a dime a dozen, though often they are masked in jokes or a nihilistic sense of humor.
In fact, Mcgraw said, if every comment were taken as seriously as Tuesday’s threat, students would never go to school
“On a day-to-day basis, there are people who joke about school shootings. It happens so much that it's almost common,” she said. “It’s just taken so lightly, it doesn’t make you uncomfortable, because you just become so accustomed to it.”
Tim Smith, interim superintendent at ACS, said officials have investigated 10 threats since Jan. 28.
While some of the AHS students interviewed said they weren't preoccupied with concern about potential violence, they also acknowledged that a student could bring a gun into the school building.
Though the school has at least four uniformed police on campus during school hours and often conducts random backpack searches, Brandon Sigler, a freshman, said he thinks it would be relatively easy to get a weapon into school.
“Drugs be going in and out all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone brings guns in,” said Sigler, noting that he would favor the installation of metal detectors at the school’s entrances.
But Preston Davis, a junior, said he doesn’t want to see the school become like a jail.
“I read a post, and someone said metal detectors for weapons should be set up. But maybe we as students wouldn’t feel right, feel like we are trapped coming to school,” he said.
The school’s administration is doing the best it can to combat outside threats, short of existing on a permanent lockdown, McKnight said. She called on students to petition elected officials to make sweeping changes across the state and country.
“I think people need to stop blaming the administration for things that happen,” she said. “The only thing you can do is take it up with government, talk to senators and representatives.”
Until such changes are made, Mcgraw added, there’s not much left to do but hope and pray it doesn’t happen here.
“You can’t stop the mindset of other people," she said. "If someone wakes up today and says, 'I want to go kill a lot of people,' then I don’t really think there is anything one person can do to stop that. We just have to accept that it happens and pray and pray and pray that it doesn’t happen to us."
Mcgraw and most of the other students interviewed agreed on one other point.
“It’s not like we are accepting the fact that school shootings happen,” she said. “We are not taking it lightly, but we are understanding this world is a really scary place.”