“To just send my child to school day after day and just cross my fingers day after day?” said Tracy L.M. Norton, who lives in East Islip, New York. “That’s no way to live.”
Norton is among parents making changes that include switching to homeschooling, buying bulletproof backpacks and checking if there are guns in homes where their kids might be playing with friends.
She has always been a proponent of public schools. But after the shooting at the Buffalo supermarket that left 10 dead and then the Uvalde massacre, she and her husband decided that as of this fall, their 8-year-old, Elizabeth, will be homeschooled.
“We really felt backed into a corner,” Norton said, as if “there really is no safe place to have our daughter in public spaces for extended periods of time.”
“If the federal government gets serious about gun control, if there’s a significant effort to buy back the number of guns that are out there, then I think public school may be in play again for us,” she added.
— Elizabeth Chuck in Bulletproof Backpacks, Homeschool: With No New Gun Laws, Parents Make Changes of Their Own
