I attended the March for Our Lives rally on Saturday, March 24, and I want to share some personal experiences. I am a preschool paraeducator for the Juneau School District, but in this letter I am speaking only for myself.<\/p>\n
Four years ago, I sat on the floor in the dark, holding a nonverbal 4-year-old with autism on my lap, trying to keep him quiet while Riverbend School was in lockdown when a student at Thunder Mountain High School brought a gun to school. I was so fully occupied with the preschoolers that I had no time to worry about my own two teenagers in lockdown at the high school at the time.<\/p>\n
Last year, my daughter was afraid to go to school amid fears that one of her TMHS classmates intended to shoot up the school.<\/p>\n
Now, in the days of ALICE drills, our preschool teachers are tasked with the responsibility of teaching 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children with cognitive disabilities the life skill of how to decide whether to hide or run away if someone is being dangerous with guns.<\/p>\n
I call upon our elected officials to accept the responsibility to make the hard decisions about gun control, so our preschoolers don’t have to.<\/p>\n
Peggy Barnhill,<\/strong><\/p>\n Juneau<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I attended the March for Our Lives rally on Saturday, March 24, and I want to share some personal experiences. I am a preschool paraeducator for the Juneau School District, but in this letter I am speaking only for myself. Four years ago, I sat on the floor in the dark, holding a nonverbal 4-year-old […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":14,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-30886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30886\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30886"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=30886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}