Parents Are Baffled by This Book Designed to Prepare Tots For a School Shooting

Sad as it may be, school shootings are a part of American schoolchildren's lives these days. Ask any elementary school student, and they can likely tell you what it means to shelter in place or what a hard lockdown entails. But explaining those concepts — and the reasons for them — to kindergarteners and first-graders can seem abstract. That's where Julia Cook's I'm Not Scared... I'm Prepared ($10) comes in. The book is printed in conjunction with a training organization called Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate, which trains older students and teachers how to handle an active shooter situation. The book takes those concepts and makes them understandable for little kids — but not everyone is in agreement with the tactics the book details.

The folks at Business Insider gave the book a read, and aside from being sad and angry that a book like this had to be written, they found themselves confused by ideas like throwing objects at the shooter to distract him and running in zigzags so it's harder for the shooter to get you. While training is necessary, is this what we need to be teaching our kids? There are many lessons to be learned from incidents like Sandy Hook, but teaching our kids scary and potentially harmful movements probably isn't the way to go.