Op-Ed: The key to a brighter future isn’t fear

My phone is buzzing.

I’m teaching my fifth graders a lesson on the solar system at the 24th Street Learning Center in South Los Angeles. My phone keeps buzzing. Without stopping, I circulate toward my desk to glance at my phone, in case it is something important.

But then I stop.

It’s a message from the principal: “Lockdown.”

I hate that word.

My kids are waiting. I look up at them, and pick up where I left off. I try to appear calm as I lower my volume considerably, start pulling down the blinds, and subtly tug on the door to make sure it is locked.

I can’t keep up talking. My stomach hurts, my heart is beating too quickly. I tell them to start working silently out of their workbooks, and I switch the lights off. They look at me funny. I make something up about the lights hurting my eyes. Maybe they think I’m sick. I certainly feel sick.

This incident ends like too many before it: “all clear,” says another message at some point, usually little follow up, maybe some tidbit about the pursuit of a burglar in the area. Ultimately, nothing too serious. But the specter of the horrors that occur around the world and now in our own backyard — in Sandy Hook, in Oregon, in San Bernardino — make each one a devastating exercise in survival-mode psychology.

I always think my best role in these circumstances is to shield my kids. I put on a calm face and hope this one isn’t the tragedy that spurs the next trending hashtag. I let the moment pass without my students even noticing. Swallowing this grenade for them hurts, but I can’t stomach the thought of them feeling this way every time someone closed the blinds at school.

When the Los Angeles Unified School District abruptly closed its 1,100 doors to its nearly three-quarters of a million students one day last month, I was at a complete loss. My job is to teach through the threats, to find a reason for the whole class to be productively silent, to let them keep being kids. What was I supposed to do now?

I did what I was told. I went home. And I came back to work the next day to a class of 10-year-olds who had aged far more than the single day that had kept us apart.

Why would someone want to hurt us? Who are they? Are they coming back?

My job now is to try my best to answer these questions honestly, with love and compassion. To attempt to surgically address the wound to their innocence without removing entirely — or letting it spread to — the whole of their childhood.

But we all have much more to do than that. We have to do more than coach our teachers and parents to better answer questions no child should have to ask. We have to dedicate ourselves to eradicate the hatred that motivates these heinous acts, and to better address the means by which they turn their hatred into a body count.

It is difficult, and painful, to conceive of the inciting incident that might actually motivate our leaders to move beyond their tired rhetoric and abstractions. For myself, my kids, and for many more there could be nothing more real, and we deserve better.

That’s why, no matter our station or formal title, it has become more clear to me than ever that we all need a new role. We can’t merely shield anymore. That’s no longer an option.

Rather than responding by raising a generation in fear, we need to empower ourselves and our kids to be part of the rethinking of how we address violence, health, safety and opportunity.

It may have seemed like a catastrophe averted, and some measure of relief for avoiding what could have been is in order, but we shouldn’t be too quick to miss the different Los Angeles we all woke up to on Dec. 16.

What do we do to fight the fear, to build a world where the scariest thing at school again is the prospect of homework over the holidays? I don’t think we have to look further than our own classrooms, and to our kids for a solution.

We need to keep investing in them, and make sure they have the very best. Our work to support them won’t eliminate all the challenges we face, but it will ensure that those who remain are met with a generation of leaders, thinkers and dreamers prepared to tackle them fearlessly.

We are counting on them. But first, they’re counting on us. We can’t let their futures languish in lockdown.

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ANDREW BLUMENFELD, a product of La Cañada Flintridge and a fifth-grade teacher, just completed service as a member of the La Cañada Unified School District Governing Board and is running to represent the 43rd State Assembly District.