Today marks the ten year anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting. Twenty children and six school staff members were murdered on that day. I send so much love to everyone affected by this horrific event, including my friend and co-founder (keep reading to learn more about this!) Abbey Clements.
Remember when we heard about this shooting? We all thought this would be it. This would be the moment that finally inspired lawmakers to pass gun control laws.
It was not.
Since Sandy Hook, there have been 189 shootings at schools around the United States that have resulted in at least one fatality. This is according to research compiled by the independent K-12 School Shooting Database research group.
I have been fortunate to not have personally experienced one of these school shootings. However, I have always felt indirectly linked to the survivors. After Sandy Hook, my students made hundreds of snowflakes to send to the school. Then, after the Parkland shooting, I watched our students embrace their activism and participate in the National School Walk Out to protest gun violence.
So, when Abbey Clements, Sandy Hook survivor, and Sarah Lerner, Parkland survivor, asked me to join them in creating a national organization for teachers with the goal of ending gun violence, I said “YES!” immediately.
We founded Teachers Unify To End Gun Violence a little over a year ago in the wake of the Oxford High School shooting in Michigan on November 30, 2021. Our goal is to build a coalition of teachers & school staff to elevate stories of gun violence & work for change. We amplify the voices of educators who survived school shootings and advocate for solutions to stop the epidemic of gun violence across the country.
By the way, if you want to join us, fill out our survey!
Sarah Lerner (right), Abbey Clements (center), Sari Beth Rosenberg (left)
To learn more about our work, here is a panel we did about a year ago with so many amazing and inspiring guests:
We are so proud of the work we have done so far and we are just getting started. To learn more about our work, please read this recent article we wrote for the American Federation of Teacher’s magazine, “American Educator":
Please also follow us on Instagram and Twitter
Also, now that I might have sparked your interest: here is a Teen Vogue piece about us and here is another great article about us from Publisher’s Weekly. Also, here’s a Time Magazine interview with Sarah Lerner and Abbey Clements about Teachers Unify.
Want to support us? You can also buy merch here or donate on our website.
But, my main ask today on this ten year anniversary of Sandy Hook is to continue to support efforts to end gun violence and vote for legislators committed to this goal.
I still believe that even though creating a world safe from gun violence has been a long time coming, a change is gonna come…but we need to keep working on this goal by lifting each other’s voices and not giving up.
Sandy Hook was the day I really started to lose faith in this country. Once we accepted that a madman could go into an elementary school and kill kindergarteners and their teachers, after which our political leaders DID NOTHING, I knew that the battle for real gun control was over and that the NRA had won unequivocally. Events since then have only further increased my pessimism.