I go to a high school where, for the past three years, there’s always one major traumatic event that unfortunately happens. My freshman year, there was a bomb threat. That day, we stood outside in the cold for around three periods. Sophomore year, there were two girls fighting and one threw bleach, injuring at least five people. And now, as a junior in high school, I didn’t think it would turn to this: my school was placed on lockdown for more than three hours. No student was able to leave the classroom. The teachers had no clue what was going on.

At 8:50 AM on a Tuesday morning, two boys started to fight in the staircase. It escalated to something much more than just a regular fist-fight. We were placed on lockdown 20 minutes after the fight happened. We were trapped in our room without any knowledge of what was going on outside of our locked door. All we saw were ten NYPD police officers roaming the third floor. They were doing a police investigation as we were sitting in the classroom doing nothing, crowded into the corner out of view of the door window. The principal came on the loudspeaker at least five times to tell us the lockdown was lifting soon. But one hour later, we still sat in a lockdown. Pictures were sent out of the S.W.A.T. team coming in. As well as a video of the violence. When we were finally allowed to leave the building, right in front was PIX11 News and Eyewitness News. When I got home and saw it on the news, I got text messages from some of my friends in New Jersey and even one of my friends in California asking me if I was okay. I didn’t think it would come to a point where I had my friends asking me that.

You don’t really think anything is going to happen to you or to your school until it does.

For the next couple of days after this incident, we had metal detectors that we had to walk through before we entered the school. For those few days, I felt safe because I knew if someone had anything on them, they would be taken away. Some New York City schools have metal detectors everyday in the school; I would love that for my school. I want to feel safe at a place where I go to learn: not to fight. People in my school may not like the idea of metal detectors, but I do. I want to feel safe. I want to not be scared that something like this or even worse will happen again.