Clear Backpacks, Columbine, and the Colors of School Safety

In elementary school, our classroom’s wooden door displayed a laminated sheet that listed emergency drills, coordinated by shades of urgency. Green, yellow, orange, red. Fire drills were fun. We stole giggles and glances at friends and crushes as everyone lined up outside on the playground. Tornado drills - when we were sure they were just drills - took us into hallways to tuck our heads between our knees for a thrilling disruption to an otherwise routine school day. Teachers taught us to scoot under our tiny desks during earthquake drills. A couple of kids would get in trouble for twisting their heads around and shaking on their backs, clearly possessed by the demons of imaginary tremors. We’d defend our acting, “But why we gotta practice sitting still for an earthquake!?”

Then, we started preparing for people to kill us.

Tornadoes don’t twist door knobs, target classrooms, punish giggles or reload weapons. Shootings are unnatural disasters. The one at Columbine happened right after my 9th birthday. Learning that kids kill kids colored my school days more. Intruder drills are dark. We’d turn off the lights, sit in silence, and hide in the coat room. At last, an administrator tapped on each door to signal that we were clear.

In the thirty years since those sixteen kids had their lives stolen in Colorado, I have been a student, youth worker and organizer, freedom school instructor, middle school teacher, board member of a youth nonprofit, the best aunt to my niblings, an improving godmother, and now parent of an eleven and nine year old– nearly an expert in first days of school. We send kids into the world. We expect them to come home with their crayons and their complaints. Sometimes, they do not. According to data by the Washington Post, more than 394,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine, impacting more than 400 schools across the country. Over 200 people have been killed and twice as many people have been injured.

On the last day before my first holiday break from teaching, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was breaking news. Word passed between teacher to teacher like a virus, each one of us sinking with symptoms of heartbreak into the spinning black office chairs around the work lounge. A few months later, pessimism spread, too. A white man in the United States of America could murder his mother, and then a class of nearly all white kindergarteners, and nothing would really happen. Twenty miniature caskets and politicians failed to carry any piece of federal legislation down the aisle to be signed into law for ten years. President Biden ultimately signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in 2022, which did not address how the Sandy Hook shooter ultimately secured the weapon used in the killing spree, which was legally obtained by his mother. More mass school shootings followed.

About ten states have bans on assault rifles, important bans birthed in the activism and tears following deadly rampages. Yet the usual political sluggishness and nothingness resulting from school shootings was one of the most important lessons that would secretly haunt me throughout the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement: most white lives did not matter in the U.S. In fact, most people who are white can never matter as long as death-dealing forms of oppression exist, including patriarchy, ableism, homophobia, imperialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. Those children were sacrificed at capitalism’s bloody altar, little casualties for the sake of gunmaking CEOs.

As with all pain and suffering, capitalists turn school shootings into a market. Kids get killed, companies get cash. According to a major study, people bought three million more guns than normal in the five months following the Sandy Hook shooting. The same study found an additional correlated spike in unintentional gun-related deaths for sixty people, including twenty children in that period. No drills or alarms or color coded systems can prepare anyone for these accidents.

Gun sales belong to an entire marketplace that depends on preventable deaths. Instead of eliminating the problems - including weapons manufacturers - capitalists sell “solutions.”

Florida is spending half a million dollars to pilot drone technology in three school districts. Pilots will operate the drones inside the schools from a remote command center, and for a thousand bucks a month, be able to “respond within five seconds and take out the shooter in less than a minute.” What if there are multiple shooters, like Columbine? Maybe multiple drones! What if the shooting takes place on the playground? Maybe playground drones! What if the shooting takes place on the school bus? Maybe school bus drones! Of course, the solutions have to be piloted, subscribed to, implemented, insured, updated, repaired, replaced, repackaged, and resold. We are in a kaleidoscope of the school to prison pipeline, military industrial complex, and carceral state.

Two years ago, my kids’ school district emailed parents another new “solution:” clear backpacks. In three bullet points, they listed that clear backpacks will help school officials scan bookbags, reduce weapons and contraband, and increase transparency among students. As cons, they acknowledged that some people might view it as an invasion of privacy and that the bookbags might be hard to find in stores. My then nine-year old child had questions.* Why are they turning our school into a prison? Isn’t that much plastic bad for the environment? What do they think might happen?*

Columbine and Sandy Hook were not secrets I withheld. His questions made me feel otherwise. When he found out how Tamir Rice was killed later in the school year, he was livid that in all that I had told him about the police, I did not tell him that they also can kill kids. In 2014, the year he was born, it was news to me, too. I learned about Aiyanna Stanley-Jones after Michael Brown was killed, even though cops killed her four years earlier. Breaking old news to children hurts. In a moment, they experience the specific cruelty of the incident, the general cruelty of the world, and immediate vulnerability to a new danger. His childhood is now colored by these events, and the clear bookpack solution was as fake as the plastic material of the bag.

His questions led us on a research journey. Some school districts in other parts of the country introduced clear bookbags and then rescinded them. Why? Clear backpacks contain polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. The kind of PVC in bookbags contains a chemical that can cause cancer, asthma, fertility issues, early puberty for girls, liver damage, and mental developmental issues. In 2022, the Charlotte School District in North Carolina halted its bookbag policy and rollout due to California Proposition 65 Warning attached to the clear backpacks, notifying consumers of cancer causing agents due to the PVC.

One year later, vinyl chloride, the underlying chemical in PVC, came into public scrutiny in the aftermath of a major train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Residents of the small, mostly white town witnessed a catastrophic spill and burn that released over 1.1 million pounds of vinyl chloride into the soil, air, and water, alongside other toxic chemicals. The Environmental Protection Agency reported that public health agencies informed residents that vinyl chloride is a known human carcinogen that “continuous lifetime exposure to low levels of vinyl chloride can increase an individual’s risk of developing liver cancer, as well as other cancers.” The EPA has ongoing reporting on the environmental impact of the toxins, explaining to residents that screenings have returned readings below the amount necessary for government protection. Residents have organized and reported otherwise, including “recurring rashes, lesions, and bloody noses endured by themselves, their loved ones, and their children.”

Not only would PVC bookbags cause plastic pollution for the planet, it was bad for humans, too.

The pervasiveness of guns and the political permission for school shootings to persist will attempt to undermine other aspects of our social, physical, and mental health. Clear backpacks - which experts warn that no evidence supports improving safety- may make parents and educators feel better. But it is not worth exposing kids to cancer causing agents, slowly, intentionally, on their backs, everyday, and equally important, conditioning us all to perform or accept additional surveillance as convenient protective measures.

My kid and I were successful at convincing some parents and the school leadership to reverse the clear backpack policy. But the next year, a new principal introduced optional mesh bookbags as an alternative, gentler surveillance, and so our fight continues. The color of school safety is not clear, and a clear backpack is not as immediately lethal as a gun. What remains dangerous is the kind of market driven approach that offers new drills and commodities towards a different kind of preventable tragedy. Let’s not be the kind of society who accepts it.