I attended the March for Our Lives rally on Saturday, March 24, and I want to share some personal experiences. I am a preschool paraeducator for the Juneau School District, but in this letter I am speaking only for myself.
Four years ago, I sat on the floor in the dark, holding a nonverbal 4-year-old with autism on my lap, trying to keep him quiet while Riverbend School was in lockdown when a student at Thunder Mountain High School brought a gun to school. I was so fully occupied with the preschoolers that I had no time to worry about my own two teenagers in lockdown at the high school at the time.
Last year, my daughter was afraid to go to school amid fears that one of her TMHS classmates intended to shoot up the school.
Now, in the days of ALICE drills, our preschool teachers are tasked with the responsibility of teaching 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children with cognitive disabilities the life skill of how to decide whether to hide or run away if someone is being dangerous with guns.
I call upon our elected officials to accept the responsibility to make the hard decisions about gun control, so our preschoolers don’t have to.
Peggy Barnhill,
Juneau