Opinion | From Columbine to Annunciation: The childhood we have accepted

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The beginning of a school year has always been a season of hope. Children trust that classrooms will be safe places to explore and learn. Parents trust that when they drop their kids off, they will pick them up again. Teachers trust that their lessons will matter more than their lockdown drills. This is the fragile covenant that makes school possible.

But for my generation, that trust has never been whole. And last week in Minneapolis, it was broken again.

When Columbine happened in 1999, most millennials were in K-12 schools. A nation that had long believed schools were untouchable suddenly realized they were not. The promise of safety cracked in a single day of violence.

For Gen Z, that crack was never repaired. We grew up in a world where school shootings were not shocking interruptions but part of the landscape of our childhood. We learned where to hide before we learned long division. We practiced silence as a survival skill. We sat on cold tile floors with the lights turned off, breathing as quietly as we could, hoping the drills would be enough if the day ever came. Even as children, we understood what it meant. Safety was no longer promised.

Our parents wrestled with the helplessness of it. For them, the question was no longer whether schools were safe, but how their children might protect themselves when they were not. The rise of cellphones in children’s backpacks was not only about staying connected with friends, but about calling home in the worst possible moment. Even now, a new generation of parents post their fears online, asking what it means when schools require phones to be locked away. A TikTok video posted by a mother, viewed more than 790,000 times, shows her voicing concern about her child’s phone being out of reach all day and wondering what would happen if the unthinkable occurred. That fear is not paranoia. It is the reality we were raised in.

These were not abstract fears. They were the whispered conversations teachers shared with one another in hallways, admitting out loud the realities we carried in silence. I can still see my students’ faces, still hear their nervous laughter as we practiced being silent in the dark. Some were too young to understand. Others understood far too well.

Watching this tragedy at Annunciation unfold, all of those memories came rushing back. The drills. The faces. The way my students’ small shoulders rose and fell as they tried to steady their breath. I thought about the parents waiting outside the school, desperate for news. I thought about the students who will carry this first week of school for the rest of their lives.

And then I realized something that has stayed with me since. My generation, Gen Z, has carried this fear since we were children, and now we are watching it be passed on to another generation. A new generation, Gen Alpha, is now inheriting the same lessons, the same drills, the same dread. How is that possible? How have we allowed this to become the story of yet another childhood?

That is the anguish of being both a student and a teacher in my generation. We have spent our entire lives rehearsing for the unthinkable while watching older generations accept it as inevitable. Leaders hold news conferences, schools hold trainings, and we keep practicing how to duck under desks and lock classroom doors with the desperate belief that help will arrive in time. But we know better. Uvalde showed us that help does not always come in time.

Since Columbine, we have accepted a society and political system that passes trauma down like an inheritance. Every child learns to rehearse fear, every parent carries the weight of “what if,” and every teacher wonders what they would do if the door handle turned. That is not safety. It is surrender.

I wish words could feel like enough in a moment like this. They cannot. But I write them anyway, because remembering matters. Bearing witness matters. And demanding that children inherit possibility instead of fear must matter too.