Two days after the deadly shooting at Robb Elementary, students at San Diego’s Del Norte High School got a glimpse of the kind of fear people at the Texas school undoubtedly felt that day.

Del Norte High was one of five Poway Unified School District campuses placed on lockdown Thursday, after somebody called in an anonymous threat to shoot up the high school and a nearby elementary school.

There was no shooting and nobody was hurt. Still, in the midst of the lockdown, students said they and their peers feared the worst — that there was an active shooter on campus.

Inside locked and darkened classrooms, students cried. People barricaded doors with desks. Students texted their parents just in case it was the last time they could message their family.

“It was a moment of, like, this might be the last time that I speak to my friends and my parents,” said Anneliese Peerbolte, a 17-year-old senior at Del Norte. “Having to text my mom like, ‘I love you. If I don’t come home tonight, know I love you,’ that’s hard.”

The events at Del Norte Thursday highlighted the fear that, in a way, has become a part of school life in the U.S. as school shootings keep happening.

“Even though it was just a threat, I just feel like ... when is it gonna stop, you know?” said Trinity Kwon, an 18-year-old senior at Del Norte. “Gun violence is ... so prevalent, and if this event didn’t speak to how much we need to change, then I don’t know what does.”

In the years following the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla., schools across the country have had to dedicate increasing amounts of time and resources to fortifying schools against intruders and preparing staff and students for the worst case scenario.

The focus on safety, while necessary, has at times distracted from student learning. Fear about gun violence at school is now compounding student mental health issues that were already exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, educators say.

“When this is over, think about it, are you ready to learn algebra? You don’t just return to learning, even after a drill,” said Greg Mizel, Poway Unified’s associate superintendent of student services, during Del Norte’s lockdown on Thursday. “They’re not learning today. Or maybe we say it’s a different kind of learning now.”

Kwon said she has spent years advocating against gun violence through Del Norte’s SAVE Promise club. Both she and Peerbolte had walked out against gun violence four years ago, when they were middle schoolers, after the Parkland shooting. Before the lockdown hit this week, the two students were planning a gun violence walkout for Friday.

So when they learned about the Uvalde, Texas, shooting, and when they had to go into lockdown themselves, Kwon said she felt discouraged.

“It just feels like we’re going back in this cycle of remembering these lives and honoring them … then all of a sudden going back to our normal lives. And then another bad shooting happens,” Kwon said.

Several San Diego school leaders said the Texas shooting reminded them of the other heavy job they carry on their shoulders, besides teaching students: keeping students safe.

“An event like yesterday reminds me how enormous the responsibility is,” Mizel said the day after the Robb Elementary shooting. “I’ve got 35,000 kids, you know, that I have to ensure are safe each and every day, and that’s no small thing.”

Take a walk around Del Norte’s campus and you can see how the country’s school shootings have, little by little, changed the face of the campus, each change reflecting a lesson learned from a past shooting.

After the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in 2012, Poway Unified reinforced gates and fencing at its campuses. Schools cut the number of points of access to campus, reworked traffic patterns for drop-off and pickup, and started requiring that all visitors sign in and take an ID picture, Mizel said.

Poway Unified schools adopted the Sandy Hook Promise nonprofit’s Say Something program, which helps teach students to look for warning signs of students about to hurt themselves or others.

After the Parkland High shooting in 2018, Poway Unified added security cameras and created a 24/7 tip line that students or staff could call to report suspicious activity, Mizel said. Schools made emergency backpacks, each containing items like a class roster, flashlights, first aid kits, exit route maps and, for younger children, coloring books to pass the time. The district hired more counselors and campus security officers.

The Robb Elementary shooting happened just as Poway Unified was in the middle of conducting “vulnerability walks” at each school in the district, where school officials walk through campus with a county school safety expert to identify potential weaknesses in campus security, asking questions like: Can everybody hear the intercom system? Where are the security cameras’ blind spots? Where might kids be jumping the fence?

Meanwhile Poway Unified has been working to provide resources to address students’ mental health.

Schools nationwide were just recently given hundreds of millions of dollars during the COVID-19 pandemic that they could use to improve student mental health. Poway Unified used that money to ramp up its mental health staffing: The district now has a clinical therapist at each high school, three counselors at every middle school and five counselors at each high school. Each elementary school has a counselor a minimum of three days a week.

Poway Unified schools each have a threat assessment team that includes mental health experts who have gone through a week of training about evaluating threats and providing appropriate interventions to students who threaten to hurt themselves or others, Mizel said.

Del Norte has also enlisted the help of about five dozen student peer counselors, who provide tutoring, mentoring, office hours, stress management workshops and other help to students.

Because of the pandemic, the district started using a web-monitoring tool called ContentKeeper, which flags the district every time a student searches for something that might indicate they are going to harm themselves or others. Mizel said he believes the tool has stopped at least four students from hurting themselves.

No amount of school safety measures can ensure a shooting won’t happen. Still, school leaders said they continue to do what they can to protect their students and staff, focusing on the factors within their control.

“You can’t anticipate every scenario, but you can do your best,” Mizel said.

On Friday morning, Peerbolte and Kwon proceeded to hold their walkout. Hundreds of students gathered in a circle on the campus quad during their homeroom period.

People held signs, held each other, and cried. It was the closure people needed after the fearful event on Thursday, Kwon said.

One by one, students read the names of the 19 children and two adults killed at Robb Elementary. After each name, the crowd held a minute of silence.

“Every time a name was called, even though we didn’t personally know them, it was this moment of imagining that child’s life and remembering and honoring that child, and just feeling the heartbreak of how gun violence affects our lives,” Kwon said.

At the end of the walkout, Peerbolte and Kwon asked students to return to class, and they did. Brian Schultz, Del Norte’s principal, estimated in an interview that close to 1,000 students walked out.

“I was just very proud of ... sorry, I’m composing myself,” Schultz said, pausing over the phone. “I was very proud of our students and our staff. To see our students be so respectful ... just continues to reiterate why I do this work. It’s nothing that I’ve ever seen in my 24 years as an educator.”

Kwon and Peerbolte, like many students, said gun violence won’t stop until change happens legislatively, at the federal level. They want universal background checks and more restrictions on who can buy weapons.

Despite everything that has happened this week, the two students said they still have hope.

“I remain hopeful that our generation will be the generation to change our world ... that we will be the ones to really say, ‘Enough is enough,’” Kwon said. “The real parents of these victims don’t forget and they don’t get to go back to their everyday lives, but we do. So we owe that to them to really change ... because no one should ever have to feel the fear they could’ve felt.”

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Kristen Taketa is the K-12 education reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune. A Los Angeles-area native, she joined the U-T in 2018 after covering education for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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