Back-to-School in Today's World

They will practice for a lockdown. A teacher will secure the windows, pull down the shades, lock the classroom door, pull down its shade, too, then turn off the lights and lead the children into a corner. The children must be silent. No speaking. No giggling. No crying.

The children and teacher will remain silent in the dark, as someone comes along and attempts to get into the classroom, knocking on the window and rattling the doorknob.

The children will stay quiet and hidden until the drill is over. Then these kindergarteners will return to their seats.

My daughter tells me this. She has just met with her 5-year-old’s teacher. Lucy is going to a new school next week. New building. New classroom. New friends. "We make a game of it," the teacher says. "So the little kids don’t get scared."

Lucy may not be scared, but I am. I'm scared for all the little children who know only what they’ve lived. Who know their mommy and daddy and their family and their friends. Who know that there are 13 steps leading to upstairs, that if you let a Fudgsicle melt in a glass it tastes like chocolate milk, and that you can’t catch bubbles with your hand. I'm scared for all the children whose whole world for five years has been their house and their backyard, their room full of toys, their stuffed animals, their nursery school, and Dora and Diego on TV.

How do you get from this innocence to a lockdown drill?

Lucy has never seen a news report. She's not allowed. No news. No violence. No regular TV.

She believes that Mary Poppins is real, that Nemo lives in the ocean, and that people burst into song and dance on the street every now and then.

I worried, when my children went off to school, not about their safety when they got there. That was a given. I worried about the bus ride, about the driver: Was she nice? Was he competent? About rain and black ice. About engine fires and blowouts. And about other drivers failing to stop when the school bus stopped.

I worried, too, about kidnappers. We used to practice. "If a pretty lady came up to you and said, 'Your mommy's had an accident and she sent me to get you,' what would you do?"

The correct answer, of course, was to not go with the lady, to yell for help and run away.

I tried to make a game of this, but my kids saw right through this pretense. "Is someone going to steal us, Mommy?" "No," I said. But they knew.

Will Lucy and her friends see through this new pretense, too?

"It's no different from the duck-and-cover exercises we grew up with," my husband says, hoping to put this drill into perspective.

But his words don't calm me. They make me crazier. I used to imagine nuclear blasts and nuclear annihilation as I hid under my desk. I used to wonder, is this another drill or the real thing? I thought about never seeing my mother and father again. I thought about them thinking of me as they hid under something just a few miles away.

I know that in today's world lockdown drills are as necessary as fire drills. And I know that a drill is just a drill. Better safe than sorry.

But I know this, too. A child's going off to school is a rite of passage. New clothes. New shoes. New lunch box. A new beginning.

Now fear is a part of that beginning. Maybe it has to be. The world, after all, is not like Mary Poppins, all magic and enchantment.

And yet, what parents and grandparents want more than anything is to pretend it is. To extend childhood for as long as possible. To let a 5-year-old remain a 5-year-old, happy and carefree.

So we will follow the teacher’s lead and tell Lucy that hiding in the dark is a fun, new game. We will applaud her stealth and her silence. We will cheer and we will smile.