New Expectations for Teachers?

my 1st teaching contract, May 1966

When I was a schoolboy in the later 1940s and early 1950s in Enid, Oklahoma, and Amarillo, Texas, we had occasional atom-bomb drills. There would be an announcement over the P.A. system (bombers sighted!), and we would crouch under our desks, arms over our heads, and I don't recall feeling anything but this: Now I'm safe!

Enid and Amarillo were both suspected targets, probably because both were homes to Air Force Bases (which is why we were living there: Dad remained in the Air Force Reserves after World War II).

I think we had fire drills, too--though I don't specifically remember them, just the vaguest memory of being lined up (on brutally hot Southwest afternoons) waiting for the "all-clear" signal.

No tornado drills that I recall even though we were in a region where they were common. School officials probably figured: If a tornado comes, nuttin' we can do about it.

On May 18, 1966, when I signed my first teaching contract in what were then called The Aurora (Ohio) Local Schools, it was all pretty vague, the terms. My salary would be $5100 (paid in semi-monthly installments). And I was expected, says the contract, "to carry out the educational programs," "attend meetings," and participate in the Ohio Teachers' Reading Circle, which I never heard of again after the day I signed that document.

That's it.

Through most of my career we had only fire drills--then, later, tornado drills (perhaps because of what had happened in nearby Newton Falls--a twister destroyed so much there in 1985). When I retired from the Aurora Schools in January 1997, we had experienced no "active shooter" drills.

But we had them at Western Reserve Academy here in Hudson, where I taught from 2001-2011. They were frightening, I have to say. Lock the classroom, get out of sight (the doors had windows in them), be silent, wait for the all-clear. I could tell the students were trying to display insouciance--as I was--but I'm betting they were as nervous--or more so--than I: They had grown up in the era of kids shooting up schools all over the place. In fact, one incident was not all that far from Hudson--Chardon High School--a little over thirty miles away, occurring in February 2012, the year after I retired from WRA.

And at last we get to the point of all of this: In recent years, some states and school districts have granted permission for teachers to be armed; armed guards are in some schools, too. A different level for fear.

And in recent weeks there has been a lot of talk about re-opening schools as COVID-19 continues to spread, infect, kill.

And the implication of all this?  My simple teaching contract from 1966 would now have to be amended--updated--and say something like this: You will be willing to give up your life for your students in the event of an active shooter in the building--or in the event of a deadly pandemic.

That's quite an expectation, isn't it?

Would you sign such a contract?