It’s a story about a lot of things that don’t get talked about much, starting with the town itself. Ask most Detroiters about Oxford, and they’ll say it’s a tiny town that runs a pretty good fall festival. Beyond that, it’s one of those towns where varsity football is King, where nearly the whole town closes so everyone can go to the game, and everyone can tell you who’s on this year’s team. A few of the town elders will still tell you Oxford was the birthplace of one of the most famous radio voices, The Lone Ranger, but other than that, it’s just a great little town that makes for a pleasant stop as you’re travelling somewhere else.
This is also a story about the Oxford Police Department, a small-town public safety program that focuses as much on community relations as it does on law enforcement. This isn’t exactly Sheriff Andy from Mayberry, but I’m hard pressed to think of another police department’s web page that boasts about its chaplaincy program, where “our Chaplain is available 24 hours a day to assist officers and citizens during times of tragic events.” In a profession where the small things make a difference, it’s clear Oxford gets that. They also understand that the minute you start bragging about them, you’ve kind of missed the point.
Closer to home for school counselors, this is also a story about lockdown drills, the exercises typically held in those first few days of school before the students arrive. To some, it’s one of those things you do to check a box so you can say you practiced the drill. In the eyes of others, it’s an object of disappointment, a premature step on the road to the loss of innocence at too early an age—“We don’t have enough time to teach handwriting, but there’s always time for a lockdown drill.” Others see them as a necessary evil; if there was a predictable pattern to where they were needed and when, no one would practice them if they didn’t have to. It’s just that no one knows where or when—so they’re conducted, just in case.
That’s where things were this Tuesday, as school counselors across the country were getting ready for another major college application deadline. A semiautomatic handgun saw to it that Oxford would be something more than a sleepy town with a tough football team, killing four, and putting the school in the company of once-unknown Columbine and Sandy Hook. The community-based peace officers took on a role they had never known, but were clearly well trained for, as the shooter was captured three minutes after they were dispatched to the high school. And those pesky, painful lockdown drills saved hundreds of lives, as students and teachers built barricades that withstood gunfire, and responded to fake “all clear” messages by holding their ground or heading for higher ground.
Not a single school counselor slept well, or at all, Tuesday night, as our hearts reached out to another set of suffering families and another suffering school, and we wondered if our school would be ready to respond. We pray we are, but we pray harder that we never have to find out. Either way, we leave this week with a greater appreciation for things too often taken for granted—leadership, protection, and advanced planning. We vow to remain alert for signs of events that are often as understated as the towns where they occur, until the unknown becomes known in ways that make us ache, and vow to do better.
Will we?
Thank you.
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