I was in sixth grade in Mrs. Lauderdale’s math class. The class was very small because it was an advanced class. All of the sudden during the middle of a math lesson, Mrs. Cooper comes on the announcements and cries, “Lockdown! This is not a drill!” Immediately Mrs. Lauderdale locks the door, turns off the lights and we shoot to the corner of the room. Inside my head, I’m freaking out because yeah, we have lockdown drills all the time, but never have they said, “This is not a drill!”

An hour passed by without anybody talking or moving. Somebody finally spoke and whispered, “Oh my gosh, this is for real!” Another hour passed. I thought, “Man, I really need to go to the bathroom”. I leaned over and murmured to Riley, “I have to go to the bathroom”. Riley said,” Me too”. “I guess we just have to hold it”, I exclaimed. Then, we started playing with erasers and throwing them in the air.

Time just crept by. We had been on lockdown for almost 2 ½ hours. We were getting a little bored. We started whispering and Mrs. Lauderdale told us her plan if somebody tried to attack us. She had a hammer and if they broke the glass and tried to open the door, she would hit their hand with the hammer.

When the 3 hour mark passed by, we started to play mancala, the stone game. We still had to be extremely quiet. Mrs. Lauderdale had her cell phone and she texted Don Corbitt to see if the outside world knew what was going on. He had no idea, so we still had no clue why we were on lockdown.

We stayed in there for another 30 minutes and the bell rang to go to lunch, and they let us out! Finally, we got to see the outside world!

It turned out that nobody had killed anybody or anything; just somebody had a gun clip at the High School. Three years later I still remember this because it shows that my school district takes these things seriously. It makes me feel a lot safer, because we are always better safe than sorry