Our statement on the Apalachee High School shooting

2–3 minutes

Following yet another school shooting in a troubling trend, how to we move forward?

Co-Editors-in-Chief

It would—almost—be easier if we could call the event in Winder, Georgia, on September 4th unprecedented.

Except it’s not. And that’s worrisome.

Every year, we receive oddly brief and ambiguous safety presentations with brief mentions of “an intruder” on campus. While we see tributes to the students and staff slaughtered—every single school month so far in 2024, in fact—we do not and cannot imagine our own peers in the same position. It’s easy in cases like these to believe it won’t affect us, whether due to conscious ignorance or plain disbelief.

Still, time and time again, we are proven wildly incorrect. As students, our first reaction to this news presents a troubling reality: we are saddened, but not shocked. In times like these, it doesn’t seem far-fetched that the next school to flash across news tickers is one familiar to us—or worse, our own. That, fundamentally, places a lasting taint both on the lives of students and the lives of young adults in America. Students’ ambitions and dreams are relegated to the back burner, and the threat of gun violence at school becomes a focal point of our academic experiences.

This also raises an alarming concern: our school, like too many others, is miserably underprepared in face of this reality. No student should have to accept the dire need for an active shooter drill at school. But this repeated violence suggests otherwise—and we must confront that. As an editorial team, we call upon the FUSD Board of Education and American High School’s administration to take transparent steps towards bolstering school site security and safety protocols; this includes significantly stronger steps than a fleeting mention of protocol in an annual school policy FLEX presentation, to be certain. We owe ourselves that much.

But when this existential threat is dismissed as “a fact of life” or something that we need to “get over,” we are empowered to choose a different path. We hope that, one day, the next generation of AHS students can hear a banging sound in the 500-wing hallway and know it’s simply a slamming door and not the sound of gunfire. We must work together as students, as a campus community—and as Americans—to create this reality.

To the voting members of our community, this November, imagine the reassurance of sending your children to school free from the threat of an entirely preventable disaster.

With equal parts concern and hope,

The Eagle Era Editorial Team