Denker: The stress of sending your kids to school amid bomb threats and yet another school shooting

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As I write this, parents across Springfield, Ohio, are receiving those dreaded alerts: in phone, email and text. Bad news always comes in threes.

COME AND PICK UP YOUR CHILD. NOW.

Parents know the feeling when you see your child’s school phone number pop up on your phone. Instantly, your senses are heightened, your heart beats faster …

Earlier this week, when I got out of the shower (pretty much the only time I am ever unreachable as a parent) I saw that I had a missed call from my oldest son’s middle school. There was no voice mail.

I didn’t call back because I knew it would go to the main school number and with hundreds of students, how could I expect them to know why my son was calling me? I told myself it was something simple: a forgotten assignment, a missed lunch. If he was sick or in danger or in trouble, they would have left a message, right?

Still, I spent the rest of the day, while working and talking to colleagues, wondering about that phone call. How could I not?

Our kids, yet again, have begun their school year in peril.

Bomb threats last week at elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio, are just the latest casualty of American childhood. Families, kids and teachers had their back-to-school thrown into upheaval due to hysterical and ridiculous repeating of a ludicrous internet rumor about Haitian immigrants, repeated not only by U.S. senators and right-wing influencers with millions of followers, but also by a former president on national television during a presidential debate.

Their calculus seemed simple: Make a few wild and salacious claims about immigrants, score a few political points to own the libs, gain the attention of a frenzied news cycle for at least a few hours, pick up followers and maybe gain a piece of a Russian paycheck in return. (Last week, an indictment revealed that six conservative influencers were being paid by a media company allegedly funded by Russian state media with the end goal of “amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition” to Russian interests.)

Why do our kids always have to pay the price?

In this environment, it’s no surprise that last month, as parents across America prepared to send their kids back to school, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released an advisory warning about parental stress as a significant public health issue.

A week after Murthy’s warning, a 14-year-old boy brought a gun to his school in Winder, Ga., killing two students and two teachers and injuring nine others.

Again, parents received alerts on their phones. Again, they rushed to rescue their kids. For some, they were too late.

One mother from Winder didn’t have to wait until her phone alerted her of the shooting. The shooter’s mother, Marcee Gray, had called the school that morning to ask them to check on her son after he sent a text message saying: “I’m sorry, mom.”

A week earlier, the shooter’s grandmother had visited the school for a meeting about her troubled grandson. His aunt, Annie Brown, told the Washington Post that he was “begging for help from everybody around him … the adults around him failed him.”

The shooter’s grandfather blamed the shooter’s father, who was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children for allegedly providing an AR-style firearm to his son while knowing he was a threat to others.

In the background of this case, as in so many other mass shootings, was family trauma and domestic violence. The shooter’s mother had been arrested on suspicion of keying her husband’s car and drug possession. The family had been evicted from at least one home as the parents went through a bitter separation and custody battle, according to CNN.

As the author of a forthcoming book on the crisis of radicalization and violence among young white men and boys, I found this story to be all too familiar. And one thing I couldn’t ignore was seeing again and again how women’s voices were dismissed: their warnings of male violence and anger and its threat to the public went unheard, while police arrested the shooter’s mother.

Again and again, white men and boys are given the benefit of a doubt by law enforcement and community officials. Until it’s too late. And the sad reality is that while many in authority likely think they’re helping white men and boys by giving them extra chances and ignoring the violent threat they pose, the truth is that they’re only making the crisis worse. White men and boys are the violent perpetrators, and they’re also victims of violence and destruction, often against themselves, as we saw in the tragic court appearance by the shooter and his father following the school shooting in Apalachee.

As I sent my own two white sons off to school this morning, vulnerable and at-risk alike, I was thinking about a lengthy interview I conducted last year with a P.E. teacher at their school. In many ways, he was a paragon of traditional masculinity: a basketball coach, 6-foot-5, respected and beloved by students, parents and fellow staff alike after decades in his position at the school.

What this powerful, strong man told me was that he was afraid. He was afraid of a school shooting, of an instance where not only could he not protect himself, he couldn’t protect the students and fellow teachers he loved, too. Physical strength and trust is no match for an automatic rifle.

And still I send my kids to school each morning, trusting that the good of (public) education outweighs the risks. We parents line up and wait to watch them sing in choir concerts and run around at school fundraisers. We ask them how their day went, and they say, “fine,” or they tell me detailed stories about kickball games at recess and drama at lunch.

Every day they go to school and come home, safely, is some kind of little miracle. But the stress adds up and lodges in my chest — the fear and intense worry and lack of trust that heightens with every new news story of school shootings and bomb threats.

As parents, we can only hope and pray. Our politicians and media figures, though, have a lot more power. Shouldn’t we expect more from them? Aren’t our kids worth it?