Message from MWISD Superintendent John Kuhn
I haven’t posted about Uvalde because I don’t know what to say. Everything seems trite in light of the horror of what happened there. Children are the most precious resource any community has. We have no greater obligation than to love them, keep them safe, teach them, guard their hearts, and guide them towards their best future. I don’t want to think about the broken-hearted parents, or the families of the adults lost, or the coworkers of the sweet teacher. I don’t want to acknowledge the person who entered such a kind place with such an evil heart. I don’t want to think about the anxiety this adds to my own students and teachers every time it happens, or to our parents, to my own sweet teacher wife, to my own children. The burdens of teaching and learning are heavy enough already.
I want to run down the litany of safety measures we have in place to reassure parents, teachers, and students, but I don’t want it to sound like school is a fortress and not a school. But I want school to be as safe as it can possibly be.
Mainly, I want a time machine. I want my childhood for my kids, when the playground didn’t have a fence around it, when moms didn’t have to show drivers licenses to bring up their kid’s lunch, when school got out and we just rode our bikes wherever we wanted. I’m not naive. I know it can’t be that way now, but I don’t understand why not.
We adults need to do better for kids. I’m a positive person, but there is so much pain and neglect going on in the hearts of American kids, they’re hurting and struggling so much, and it’s been this way for awhile, and people don’t realize the five-alarm fire blazing across our kids’ hearts—unless they’re teachers, cops, or social workers. Then they see it all too clearly.
I don’t want to be Chicken Little—the sky isn’t falling…unless it’s held up by the hearts of our children and teenagers. And if it is, then I assure you from what I hear and see in my role as an educator, brother of educators, husband of an educator, dad of students, member of the CAC board of directors, former board member at Star Council on Substance Abuse, friend to a million teachers, I assure you that what I see from my perch is this: if our children’s hearts hold up the sky, half or more of American kids’ hearts are breaking silently every single day from all the love and positive attention and caring discipline and TIME they aren’t getting from us adults, and from the poisons they imbibe from celebrities and social media every day, and if these delicate hearts hold up the sky then, yes, it’s falling. It’s falling slowly, with each new broken heart that needs to be made whole.
Love every kid you can like they’re your own. And do all the good you can while you’re alive. I believe darkness is just a speck in the light, and I believe people of goodwill outnumber the others. But on days like today, it’s hard for us all.
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