CPS School Put on Lockdown

I apologize to the karma gods for poking fun at school fundraisers yesterday.  Apparently, a good chunk of this money goes directly to lockdown preparedness and training, as witnessed by my fellow carpool mom on Monday.

Ironically, yesterday was when my husband and I decided to keep our oldest in his selective enrollment school for next year.  Coincidence?  We'd been wavering between making my life easier by consolidating schools (next year we'll have 3 schools to contend with) or keeping him at the 3rd-rated school in the state.  While I'm usually one to put academics above all else, I was having a hard time visualizing my days:  hours and hours spent riding around in my minivan.  It smells like dirty kids.  I would smell like dirty kids.  Gas money would eat up my Brazilian liposuction fund.  The laundry would never get done.  The reasons were piling up faster than I could process (I didn't mean that as a laundry metaphor, but so be it).  

Carpool mom fills me in.  Apparently, some guy with a possible weapon was running amok in the area, so the school was limiting entry and carefully monitoring all exits during pick-up time.  Several of the parents were impressed with the professionalism and diligence of the lockdown.  Like they'd done this before?

I quickly called some of my suburban friends for input, and to my horror, discovered that apparently this kind of thing happens all the time.  Escapees from mental institutions, ex-husbands with weapons, gas station robbers...it seems the list of loons who can send schools into crisis management mode is endless.  Let's just keep piling on the mountain of crap that keeps me up at night.  My worry stone has already disintegrated.  I'm going to need a worry boulder to get me through the next couple of years.  Oy vey.