Baltimore County Student Writes Op-Ed On How To Survive Mass Shooting
BALTIMORE CO., Md. (WJZ) - We often hear about opinion pieces in newspapers written by adults, but Thursday there was an unexpected voice in the Baltimore Sun.
During the first week of school students received a potentially life-saving lesson on what to do if there is an active shooter in their building. This new reality was so overwhelming, one student decided to write about it; a personal, she initially wrote it in her journal.
"Maybe it will save five lives or 10... But it's surreal that we students are learning to fight for our lives at school," Margot Deguet-Delury wrote in the Baltimore Sun. "I mapped out every classroom for escape routes. This is what I think about in calculus," she says.
It was an opinion piece about how to survive a mass shooting.
"It's something that I never thought I would have to do in school," Deguet-Delury said.
Margot a Baltimore County student, was in elementary school during the shooting at Sandy Hook. Similarly haunting images have been replayed numerous times since then.
"When Parkland happened a lot of us just weren't even surprised and I think that's what concerned me the most is that we are getting used to this," Deguet-Delury said. "It scares me that it would happen to me, it scares me that my sister is in middle school, so it scares me that something like that would happen to her."
This summer, Baltimore County teachers went through an active shooter training in a program called ALICE. The acronym stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate, steps to survive. It's a lesson teachers passed on to their students and it's a reality they're now talking and writing about.
"I would just like my article to be able to speak for all of the students who are living with this fear and I just really hope that fear is going to go away at some point," says Deguet-Delury.
To read the entire Op-ed, click here.
Earlier this year Baltimore County Public Schools shared a news release on the steps that are being taken to enhance school safety. Click here to read the news release. http://www.bcps.org/news/articles/article10031.html
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