A Scare At Austin Middle School. Lockdown Initiated For Possible

When I was growing up and going to school, it always felt like the safest place to be. You never heard of schools going on lockdown, potential threats, or worse, ACTUAL threats that got carried out.

Now, our kids go through actual training and drills for lockdowns and how to exit a school in case of something catastrophic. All we had to worry about were fire drills.

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Columbine happens in Colorado and thus began the era of having to worry about school shootings happening more often. As I got older and had kids myself, it became something I worried about every day that my kids got dropped off.

Every day, I think to myself, please don't let anything happen. I won't be able to handle it.

This morning, my phone buzzes and alerts me to an email. I open it up. My heart sank immediately as I read the title of the email.

I couldn't open the email fast enough. Safety hold. What was going on? Was a threat called in? Was someone inside my son's school? IS HE SAFE? My mind racing a million miles a minute, and my heart thumps out of my chest.

I continue reading the email.

Oh, thank GOD everything is ok. A toy gun. No doubt someone at school saw a kid pull this out of their bag, show it off and reported it to administration thinking a student had an actual gun on campus.

Kudos to the staff for acting on it so quickly, that's the first step in preventing something bad from happening. But it leads me to this.

I know without checking our kids' bags every single day before they walk out of the house for school, we don't know if they're bringing something to school that could be misconstrued or isn't allowed, and kids are sneaky about hiding things. I'm not blaming anyone, but we have to try and find a way to prevent this from happening. Causing panic for hundreds of families because one kid thought he was being cool or funny is unnecessary.