School shootings are common enough for people to expect them to happen with some degree of regularity…but they are rare enough that people don’t actually expect it to happen to them. Perhaps that is why all systems failed in a recent shooting at an elementary school.

Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia was the site of a school shooting in which a 6-year-old first grader was the perpetrator. The only casualty was his teacher who suffered life-threatening injuries but has since recovered. Bypassing the obvious question of how a 6-year-old got his hands on a gun in the first place, other systems failed that day.

It has since come out that the appropriate people were notified not once, not twice, but three times that the boy had a gun. It’s worth noting there was allegedly some sort of search but not one exhaustive enough to produce the gun because he had it on his person when he shot the teacher.

This is not in no-way to make an excuse for the administrators that day, but it is understandable how something like this could happen. The truth is educators around the country ignore threats every single day.

Unfortunately, it is not all that uncommon to hear a kid talk about shooting up the school or hear rumors of a student with a weapon. Many of these threats are dismissed as jokes or gossip, and sometimes they are. But sometimes they aren’t, and nobody wants to be the person to learn that the hard way.

I have been that person.

Don’t get me wrong, I have never had the misfortune of ignoring a school shooting threat that materialized into an actual shooting. However, I did have one regrettable moment where I ignored some gossip about a student getting jumped. I had heard students claiming there was going to be a fight between two students, but I hear that every day. I didn’t hear enough or see any other signs that compelled me to take further action, especially because school was almost over and it was right before winter break. When I came back from break I heard that the students did fight and eventually other students jumped in on behalf of their friend and it turned into a jumping where a boy was hurt.

Those kids lived down the street from each other, so I don’t know if the conflict was avoidable. But I did have agency to stop the fight from happening that particular day. If both parties had been called into the office before maybe the beef could have been squashed. Perhaps notifying parents to keep their eye out could have averted the situation too, but I will never know because I did nothing.

As a teacher, it can be hard to chase down every single lead when it comes to threats of violence. However, the lesson I learned is that you should at least try because should the worst come to pass you will regret your in-action.