Teachers in Transition: Career Change and Real Talk for Burned-Out Teachers

Abby Zwerner Followed the Rules. The Rules Failed Her

• Vanessa Jackson • Episode 276

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In this deeply personal and emotionally charged episode, Vanessa Jackson steps away from her usual format to examine the civil trial of Abby Zwerner, the first-grade teacher shot by a six-year-old student. This is not a story about politics—it’s a case study in ignored warnings, failed leadership, testing culture, and the trauma teachers are expected to survive in silence. If you’re an educator, this episode will feel painfully familiar. It’s a mirror held up to a broken system—and a call to stop accepting the unacceptable.

 

🧭 Timestamps for Navigation

Use these timestamps in the episode description or show notes so listeners can jump to the parts that resonate most:

  • 0:00 – Introduction & Framing
  • 4:07 – The Pattern of Ignored Warnings
  • 10:05 – The Defense’s Strategy: Deflect, Distract, and Weaponize
  • 17:29 – The Test-Score Obsession
  • 22:51 – Authority, Safety, and the Functionally Absurd Gap
  • 28:47 – Leadership Accountability
  • 35:00 – The Human Cost
  • 40:50 – Broader Systemic Implications
  • 47:47 – In Closing: What Are We Willing to Accept?

Please share this with anyone you feel needs to hear it.  And if you want to talk, - contact me. I’m here. 

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The transcript to this podcast is found on the episode’s homepage at Buzzsprout

Section 1: Introduction (0:00)

Hi! Before we begin, I need to say this clearly: this episode carries a trigger warning for gun violence, trauma, and school shootings.
If you need to skip this one, please do, and I’ll see you here next time. 
Take care of yourself first.

For those of you who choose to stay, we’re going to talk about the ongoing Abby Zwerner trial — not as a headline, but as a case study in what happens when leadership, policy, and human safety collide. There is no course link, and no upbeat music cue at the end. This just needs to be said. 

If you haven’t been following this case closely, here’s the brief background. On January 6, 2023, first-grade teacher Abby Zwerner was shot by one of her six-year-old students at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia. The bullet passed through her left hand and lodged near her heart. She somehow got the rest of her class to safety before collapsing in the hallway. The child was later found to have taken the gun from home.

What is happening now is the civil trial. Abby Zwerner is suing the assistant principal, Ebony Parker, and the Newport News School District for negligence — claiming that multiple warnings were ignored in the hours leading up to the shooting. The defense argues it was an unforeseeable tragedy, that the people in charge couldn’t have known what was about to happen. Those twelve jurors will decide whether it was an accident… or a failure.

But for teachers — for anyone who’s ever stood in a classroom with twenty-five lives (or more!) depending on you — this isn’t abstract. It’s personal. It’s the nightmare you never say out loud. And what’s unfolding in that  classroom [sixcourtroom] right now says a lot about how the profession is viewed, not just by the public, but by the institutions that claim to support it.

Here’s what this episode won’t be: it won’t be a political argument. It won’t be a debate about gun laws or party platforms. What I want to explore is how a teacher can do everything right and still end up broken, how leadership structures designed to keep people safe can become paralyzed by fear and policy, and what that means for the future of the profession.

We’ll move through this in sections.
 We’ll start with what we know — the ignored warnings and the chain of command.
 Then we’ll talk about the defense’s strategy and what it reveals about the cultural mistrust of teachers.
 We’ll dig into how testing culture and bureaucratic rigidity put policy over people.
 And we’ll spend real time on the question that sits at the heart of all of this: When a teacher feels unsafe, what power do they actually have?

I’ll also talk about trauma — not just Abby’s, but the trauma that ripples through every person in that building, through the children, the colleagues, the community. And finally, we’ll look at what this case means on a national level. Because make no mistake: every teacher in America is paying attention. Every future teacher is deciding whether this profession is still worth it.

This episode is longer than usual because this story demands it. There’s no quick way to unpack a system this complicated or a wound this deep. As I sit here and record this, the closing arguments ended yesterday.  And the day this podcast drops is when the closing arguments will begin. My goal isn’t to sensationalize it. It’s to humanize it. To say out loud what so many educators are feeling: that this was preventable, that it was mishandled, and that the cost of inaction is far too high.

So take a breath, and when you’re ready, we’ll begin.

 

Section 2: The Pattern of Ignored Warnings (4:07)

Every tragedy has a timeline. What happened in Abby Zwerner’s classroom wasn’t spontaneous; it was the end point of a chain of ignored warnings. And what’s coming out in this trial is how many people did see the danger coming, how many chances there were to intervene, and how leadership failed to act on any of them.

According to testimony, concerns about this particular student had been building for months. He had a history of violent outbursts and threats. His behavior was serious enough that the school had an arrangement requiring a parent to attend class with him. On the morning of January 6th, that parent did not show up. The student arrived alone. That should have been the first alarm bell.

Throughout that morning, at least three separate staff members raised concerns. Reading specialist ,Amy Kovac, testified that she went looking for the student after hearing he might have a gun. She said she reported her concern directly to the assistant principal, Ebony Parker, and was told the situation was “handled.” Guidance counselor, Rolonzo Rawles, also testified that he was worried. He’d been told the student might be armed. He requested a search of the backpack. And according to his account, that request was denied.

At some point, the bag was reportedly checked by another staff member, briefly, but not searched thoroughly. There’s conflicting testimony about who saw what, but the consistent thread is hesitation. Each adult deferred upward, following the chain of command, waiting for the green light that never came. And when the shooting happened, that entire chain collapsed.

This is where the phrase “preventable” becomes real. From a legal standpoint, the jury has to decide whether the event was foreseeable—that’s the technical term, the hinge of negligence law. But from a teacher’s standpoint, foreseeability isn’t a theory. It’s intuition backed by experience. Every educator in that building felt that risk escalating. They followed the protocol, they voiced their concerns, and still, nothing happened. That’s not unforeseeable—that’s unheeded. That is ‘ignored.’

The warnings came in waves. First the missing parent, then the behavioral red flags, then the verbal reports that a gun might be in the building. Each step was an opportunity to act: to remove the student, to check the backpack, to call for assistance, to place the building on alert. Instead, each step became a conversation, a meeting, a delay. And that is how systems fail—not through one catastrophic choice, but through a series of small dismissals that add up to a disaster.

Several staff members testified that the assistant principal appeared more concerned about maintaining order than about investigating the threat. The school was reportedly in the middle of make-up standardized-tests , and no one wanted to disrupt the schedule. That detail - testing over safety - sits at the heart of why this case matters. Because it shows what happens when administrative priorities drift away from human priorities. When the system becomes more invested in its image than in its people.

By the time the shot was fired, every adult who had tried to raise a flag had been effectively silenced by procedure. Not intentionally silenced—no one said “don’t speak”—but institutionally muted by a culture that rewards compliance over conviction. In schools, this looks like politeness, chain-of-command etiquette, and “not overstepping.” But in practice, it’s how life-and-death warnings get lost in bureaucracy.

From the outside, people often ask how something like this could happen in an elementary school. But teachers understand it immediately. Because they know the feeling of sending up a warning and watching it disappear into a void of meetings, policies, and “we’ll look into that.” They know how many times they’ve been told, “We can’t act on hearsay,” even when their gut says the threat is real.

That’s why this case is resonating so deeply across the profession. It’s not just about the bullet. It’s about the pattern—the way teachers’ concerns are minimized until they become evidence in a courtroom. It’s about a system that teaches educators to keep their heads down, to stay in their lane, to trust leadership even when leadership is looking the other way.

What the testimony reveals is heartbreaking in its ordinariness. No one screamed. No one panicked. Everyone assumed that it would be handled. It’s the same quiet chain of deference that runs through thousands of schools every day. The difference is that, on this day, it ended in blood.

So when we talk about accountability, we’re not talking about one bad decision. We’re talking about a structure that allowed multiple good people to follow the rules and still watch those rules fail. That’s the pattern of ignored warnings, and it’s the pattern that every teacher listening to this right now can recognize in their bones.

Section 3: The Defense’s Strategy – Deflect, Distract, and Weaponize (10:05)

From the moment the defense began cross-examining witnesses, one thing became obvious: this case wasn’t just about establishing facts. It was about shaping perception. Every question, every insinuation, every sideways glance was aimed at redirecting blame—away from leadership and toward everyone else in the building.

It’s the classic strategy of deflect and distract.
When you can’t defend the choices made at the top, you start dissecting the choices made at the bottom.

First came the character work. The defense focused on Abby Zwerner’s mental-health history - her past diagnoses of anxiety and depression - as if those conditions somehow made her less credible, and is completely horrifying when almost every woman in teaching ends up with a diagnoses of anxiety or depression at some point.  Or less deserving of protection. They asked about her social life, her hobbies, the fact that she’d gone to a concert months after the shooting.  Heaven forbid  that she do anything to try and distract form what she had been through, They pointed to her progress in cosmetology school as proof that her trauma couldn’t be that severe.
 The implication was unmistakable: if she could smile in a photo, she must be fine. Which goes again everything all teachers know that we have been to do.  As a teacher who was trained to smile and pretend nothing was going on on September 11, 2001, it is INSANE that this is the expectations of teachers and that they twist it and use it against us. 

This is a well-worn legal playbook. Turn the victim into a person whose pain can be questioned. Make the jury wonder whether she’s exaggerating, whether she’s “that kind of teacher.” It wasn’t about evidence. It was about erosion. Chip away at empathy until what’s left is doubt.

Then came the professional deflection. The defense began spreading accountability like a deck of cards. The counselor could have done more. The reading specialist should have pushed harder. The lead teacher - that phrase came up again and again - was supposedly in charge of safety procedures that, in reality, she had no authority to enforce.

Anyone who’s ever worked in education could see that flaw instantly. A lead teacher isn’t an administrator. They can’t issue disciplinary orders or authorize searches. They’re mentors and liaisons, not decision-makers. It is a point of communication dissemination so that the principal doesn’t have to walk around and tell everybody.  But to a jury unfamiliar with school hierarchies, the title sounds powerful. And that’s exactly what the defense relied on - a public misunderstanding of how schools actually work.

This is where the language of education becomes a weapon once again. Titles that sound impressive to outsiders like lead teacher, specialist, or facilitator don’t carry legal authority inside the system. Yet the defense leaned hard on those words to create confusion. They wanted the jury to believe that responsibility was shared evenly, when in truth, authority was not.

It’s the same linguistic sleight of hand that’s kept teachers stuck in impossible roles for years. Words that make them sound empowered while keeping them powerless. Lead teacher instead of manager. Coach instead of director. Team leader instead of decision-maker. It’s the illusion of control without the reality of agency. And in this case, that illusion is being used to rewrite the story of who failed to act.

The defense’s narrative doesn’t stop at titles. It taps into a much broader current of misinformation that’s been swirling around the profession for years - the idea that teachers are politically or ideologically driven, that they can’t be trusted, that they exaggerate problems for sympathy or attention. That suspicion has become part of the cultural air we breathe. And in that courtroom, it’s being leveraged for legal advantage.

When you paint teachers as emotional, unstable, or agenda-driven, it becomes easier to question their judgment. It becomes easier to argue that a calm administrator made a “reasonable decision” under pressure while the teachers overreacted. Never mind that those “overreactions” were warnings that could have saved lives.

And that’s the real danger here—not just for Abby Zwerner, but for every educator watching. Because if the defense succeeds in convincing a jury that this was simply a tragic accident, that the administrators did the best they could with limited information, then it sets a precedent. It tells districts everywhere: as long as you can frame your teachers as hysterical or mistaken, you’re safe.

The truth is far simpler. The people closest to the problem raised the alarm. The people with the power to act did not. Everything else is noise.

This trial has become a mirror reflecting how our culture talks about teachers. When educators set boundaries, they’re called rigid. When they demand safety, they’re told they’re overreacting. When they burn out, they’re told to practice self-care. And when they’re harmed, the first question is, What did she do wrong?

That question isn’t just offensive—it’s revealing. It shows how deeply we’ve internalized the idea that teachers are endlessly responsible but rarely innocent. That somehow, if something goes wrong in a school, it must trace back to the classroom.

In reality, leadership failed to lead. Policy failed to protect. And a profession already stretched to its breaking point is being asked to absorb one more blow.

The defense may be doing its job, but its tactics expose exactly what’s wrong with the system it’s trying to protect: a refusal to acknowledge that accountability rises with authority. Teachers did not design these policies. They did not enforce the culture of silence. They did not ignore the warnings. They lived through the consequences.

So when we hear the defense talk about who “should have done more,” we have to ask—why are they always talking about the people with the least power to act?

Section 4: The Test-Score Obsession (17:29)

When the counselor and reading specialist testified, one detail slipped into the record almost quietly, but it might be the most damning fact in the whole case. They said the reason the administrator hesitated to act that morning was because the school was preparing for make-ups for standardized testing.

Think about that for a second.
 A teacher says she believes a six-year-old might have a gun, and the first concern is not safety of everyone in the building It’s the test schedule!!

That sentence alone tells you everything about how warped the priorities in public education have become.

Over the past twenty years, test scores have become the currency of the system. They determine funding, rankings, bonuses, even job security. They decide whether a principal is labeled “effective” and whether a district earns an A or a C on a state report card. When those numbers carry that much weight, everything else—safety, morale, common sense—starts to orbit around them.

And that pressure doesn’t just sit on administrators. It trickles down. Teachers learn early that instructional minutes are sacred, that disruption equals data loss, and that test prep is non-negotiable. A child having a meltdown in the hallway? Document it, de-escalate, and get back to that lesson. A threat of violence? Call the office, fill out the form, but whatever you do, don’t fall off the pacing guide.

That mindset is how you end up with an assistant principal weighing the risk of a gun against the risk of bad optics. It’s not because that person is evil—it’s because the system has trained them to fear the wrong consequences.

We’ve built a culture where educators are punished more for a missed benchmark than for a missed warning. Where a dip in reading scores generates more outrage than a teacher’s plea for help. Where “accountability” means spreadsheets, not stewardship.

I’ve sat in enough data meetings to know how this happens. Someone projects a color-coded chart on the wall, and everyone starts talking about “growth” and “targets.” And “bubble kids.” The human stories disappear behind percentages. That’s not leadership; that’s bureaucracy pretending to be progress. When the kids that need the most help get ignored because they won’t the grade on the school’s report card so you focus on the ‘bubble kids’ who were close

In the Richneck case, that obsession became literal. The testimony suggests that the reason protocols weren’t followed—the reason the backpack wasn’t searched, the reason no lockdown was called—was because testing prep couldn’t be interrupted. The administrator didn’t want chaos. They wanted quiet hallways and uninterrupted instruction.

But safety doesn’t schedule itself around testing windows. You can’t put potential violence on hold until after the reading exam.

At no point—at no point—should a standardized test outweigh the life of a human being. Yet here we are, dissecting a tragedy born from that very calculus.

It’s easy to blame the individual, but this runs deeper than one person’s judgment. It’s systemic. The test-score machine has turned schools into factories of compliance, where data drives decisions more than discernment does. Administrators are rewarded for efficiency, not empathy. Teachers are evaluated on numbers, not nuance. And children are reduced to performance indicators instead of people.

When you operate inside that culture long enough, hesitation becomes instinct. “Don’t cause a scene.” “Don’t overreact.” “Don’t let this ruin testing week.” And so, in that moment when urgency was needed most, leadership did exactly what the system trained it to do: protect the numbers.

The tragedy is that those numbers will outlive the people they failed to protect. The test scores from that week are still sitting in a database somewhere—neatly archived, proudly reported, utterly meaningless. Meanwhile, a teacher carries a bullet next to her heart.  I learned just this week that they can’t remove it. And a generation of children carries a memory that no exam will ever measure.

That’s the real accountability metric we should be talking about. Not proficiency rates. Not growth bands. The question should be: Did we keep our people safe?
 And if the answer is no, then nothing else we measure matters.

Section 5: Authority, Safety, and the Functionally Absurd Gap (22:51)

One of the loudest questions coming out of this trial has been, “Why didn’t the teacher just check the backpack?” It’s a question that sounds simple until you look at the layers of law, policy, and plain human fear underneath it. On the surface it sounds like a common sense - if you think a child might have a weapon, you look. But inside a school system, “common sense” often collides with policy manuals, legal precedent, and fear of litigation. Or really the fear for the rest of their career if they lose their teaching certification.

Under U.S. law, public-school students don’t surrender their rights when they walk through the door. The Fourth Amendment still applies. In 1985, the Supreme Court decided New Jersey v. T.L.O., (the initials of the student) which says that a search by school staff must be reasonable—reasonable in its cause and reasonable in its scope. Teachers don’t need “probable cause” like the police, but they do need a justifiable suspicion. It has to be something more than a hunch.

That standard sounds flexible, but in practice it’s a trap. Districts, terrified of being sued, often layer extra approval steps on top of the federal standard. In Newport News, there are reports of a policy that required a parent to be present before this student’s belongings could be searched And especially for this student, imagine what that means in real time. A teacher thinks a six-year-old might have a gun, but she can’t open the backpack until a parent arrives. It’s policy written for a meeting room, not a crisis.

Could she have at least taken the bag away? Maybe. But here’s where we cross into what I will call the functionally absurd. Picture a teacher saying, “I’m not searching it, I’m just moving it.” Technically compliant, legally cautious, and practically useless. The danger doesn’t change because the zipper stayed closed. The adult still assumes the risk, and the children are still in the room. It’s the classroom equivalent of that sibling taunt - “I’m not touching you” while their hand hovers an inch from your face. The rule may be being obeyed to the letter, but the spirit of safety is already broken.

And that leads to the question no one in policy seems eager to answer: When a teacher feels unsafe (when a teacher IS unsafe), what recourse do they actually have? If you’re told to call the office, and no one comes; if you’re told to wait for administration, and they don’t act—what then? Are you supposed to lock down your classroom based on instinct? Evacuate your students without authorization? Or do you sit and hope that the people above you decide to take you seriously?

The uncomfortable truth is that most teachers are trapped in that space between responsibility and permission. They are expected to protect every child in the room, but often denied the authority to do it. They are trained to de-escalate, not to act decisively. And when something goes wrong, they’re the first ones blamed for not doing enough. It’s a lose-lose equation written into the job description.

The special-education angle makes that equation even more complicated. Under federal law, every student with a disability has the right to be educated in the Least Restrictive Environment, or LRE. It’s a beautiful principle designed to make sure students aren’t isolated or excluded unnecessarily. But “least restrictive” doesn’t mean no restrictions.  It doesn’t mean “no boundaries.” It means “appropriate support.” If a student’s behavior requires a parent to attend school every day, then the question isn’t whether the teacher did enough, it’s whether the placement itself was ever appropriate for a general-education classroom.

When those boundaries blur, the burden shifts downward. The teacher becomes the de facto safety officer, counselor, and crisis negotiator, all while trying to meet test-score targets and maintain instructional minutes. Administrators can point to inclusion policies; parents can point to student rights; but the teacher is the one standing in the middle of a potentially volatile situation, unarmed and unsupported.

This trial really lays that bare. The defense may argue that Abby Zwerner should have done more, but they’re ignoring how the system she worked in tied her hands. She followed the procedures she was given. She reported concerns through the proper channels. She relied on the hierarchy that every school drills into its staff, and that hierarchy failed her.

There’s a cruel irony in all of this. Teachers are trusted enough to shield children with their bodies, but not trusted enough to unzip a backpack. We have built a culture where policy matters more than instinct, and liability matters more than life. And when tragedy strikes, the people who wrote the rules step back while the person who followed them stands trial in the court of public opinion.

At the heart of this is a simple belief—one that should never be controversial: Every child has the right to learn in safety, and every teacher has the right to teach without fear. That’s not radical. That’s the floor. But until policy catches up to that truth, we’ll keep asking the same impossible question every time tragedy hits a classroom: Why didn’t the teacher do more? And the real question is, Why didn’t anyone let her?

 

Section 6: Leadership Accountability (28:47)

If Section 5 is about the gap between authority and safety, this part is about who created that gap and who refused to close it.

The people inside that building did what they were supposed to do. They followed that chain of command. The reading specialist, the counselor, the lead teacher—each of them raised concerns that morning about that student. They said he might have a weapon. They asked for help. STUDENTS raised the concern.  They did not have the power to search, suspend, or remove him. Only administration did. And according to multiple testimonies, that help never came.

That’s the part that gets missed when people outside education talk about “teacher responsibility.” In a school, there’s a very specific hierarchy for a reason. Teachers manage classrooms. Administrators manage buildings. Counselors manage interventions and supports. When the hierarchy works, information moves quickly, decisions get made, and everyone stays safe. When it fails, the very structure that’s supposed to protect people becomes the thing that traps them.

The defense has tried to blur those lines—to suggest that a “lead teacher” or a “specialist” should have done more, as if those titles carried actual authority. They don’t. A lead teacher is not an assistant principal. A counselor can’t initiate a lockdown apparently at this campus. They can report. They can advise. But they don’t get to command. If you’ve ever worked in a school, you know the difference instinctively. If you haven’t, it’s very easy to believe the spin.

This is where the public conversation often turns cruel. We praise teachers for their devotion, then crucify them for not being superhuman. We tell them to “treat every child like your own,” but also to follow every policy to the letter. We call them heroes when they die protecting students, but question their judgment if they survive. It’s an impossible double standard, and this trial exposes it in real time.

Leadership isn’t about having the title—it’s about acting when it matters. When multiple adults in a building tell you they believe a child has a gun, leadership means you stop everything until you’re sure. It means you take the warnings seriously, And even if they turn out to be false, it means you prioritize people over paperwork.

That didn’t happen here. According to testimony, there were repeated opportunities to intervene: remove the student, search the backpack, call the parent, contact security. Each opportunity passed up the chain until it reached the one person with the authority to act, and there it stalled. The reason given? Standardized testing.

And personally, I don’t want to lay all the blame at the feet of Ebony Parker  She is an ASSISTANT principal.   There is a nameless principal that has disappeared into the ether. Where was THAT person.  Why wasn’t THAT person brought into the conversion?  I am not even prepared to discuss that part of it. 

That sentence alone tells you everything about how warped our educational priorities have become. When a system values test completion over human safety, it has lost its moral compass. No administrator wants to cancel a test day. It throws off schedules, funding calculations, and accountability reports. But if the choice is between a test and a teacher’s life, that’s not a hard decision. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

There’s another layer here that deserves attention: culture. Culture determines whether a teacher feels safe reporting a concern in the first place. It determines whether an administrator listens or brushes it off. When leaders treat safety warnings as annoyances or “overreactions,” they send a clear message: keep quiet, keep teaching, keep that data clean. That silence trickles down until it becomes part of the institution’s DNA.

This isn’t just about one administrator in one school. It’s about every district that trains teachers to obey but not to question. It’s about every district that punishes the teachers that DO question.  It’s about every policy manual that teaches compliance over critical thinking. It’s about every leader who confuses managing with leading. Leadership isn’t paperwork. It’s presence. It’s accountability. It’s the willingness to stand in the hallway and say, “Stop. This matters.”

When administrators fail to act, the whole system fails. Because teachers can only do so much from the front of the room. They can raise alarms. They can follow procedures. But they can’t enforce policies that leadership won’t back up. They can’t search a backpack that policy forbids them to touch because in the event that they’re wrong, they’re the ones whose livelihood suffers even if there was a reasonable reason to search. They can’t protect students if the system won’t protect them.

What happened at Richneck Elementary is the natural result of a structure that has forgotten who it’s supposed to serve. Schools exist for children and the adults who care for them—not for test scores, not for reputation management, and not for district optics. Leadership means remembering that it means making the hard call in the moment, not rewriting the story after the fact.

And that’s why this trial matters so much. It isn’t about punishing one administrator. It’s about whether we, as a society, are willing to hold leadership to the same standard of accountability we expect from teachers every single day. Because if we don’t, then the message is clear: teachers are expendable, and leadership is untouchable.

That cannot be the lesson we leave behind.

 

Section 7: The Human Cost (35:00)

When you strip away the legal arguments, the policies, and the public statements, what’s left is a woman who was shot by a six-year-old child.
 And what’s also left — what we cannot lose sight of — is the aftermath.

Abby Zwerner’s injuries didn’t end when the bullet stopped moving. It tore through her hand, damaged tendons, shattered bone, and came to rest so close to her heart that doctors decided surgery would be more dangerous to remove it than to leave it there. That means she will carry it for the rest of her life — physically and emotionally. Every heartbeat is a reminder of what happened in her classroom.

Since the shooting, she’s endured multiple surgeries and months of physical and occupational therapy. She has limited use of her left hand. She lives with chronic pain and the invisible wounds that come with trauma: nightmares, hypervigilance, anxiety, flashbacks. The psychiatrist who testified described her as withdrawn and fearful, often unable to be around groups of children. Think about what that means — a teacher who loved her students so much she risked her life for them, now finds it painful to walk into a classroom and be around them.

And she isn’t the only one carrying that weight. The children in that room were six and seven years old. They watched their teacher get shot and bleed. They were hustled into the hallway and told to run. For some, the sound of a slamming door or a loud pop will now live in their nervous systems forever. Their sense of safety in the world — that fragile belief that adults can keep you safe — was shattered that day.

Trauma doesn’t stay contained within four walls. It seeps outward. It moves through teachers who comforted crying students, through the staff who cleaned the hallways, through the counselors who had to explain to parents why their children woke up screaming. It lingers in the building itself — in the way light hits the floor, in the echo of morning announcements, in the smell of crayons and pencil shavings that were in the room when it happened. A classroom can be disinfected, but it can’t be spiritually sterilized. The walls remember.

We’ve seen this before. Santa Fe. Parkland. Uvalde. Sandy Hook. Each time, the news cycle ends, the vigils fade, and administrators promise new procedures. But for those who were there, time doesn’t reset. I think every dayabout that student from Santa Fe whose mother shared how long it took to clear the building and her daughter spent hours in a dark closet, holding a deceased friend. That child, that girl never really went back to school — not in person, not emotionally. Her body survived, but her childhood did not.

That’s what trauma does. It rewrites you. It takes the familiar — a desk, a hallway, a backpack — and turns it into a trigger. Teachers know this better than anyone because they watch it play out in real time. They see it in the students who flinch at loud noises, who panic during drills, who cry without knowing why. And they carry their own version of it too. Every “what if” becomes a shadow that follows them through every lesson plan and every lockdown drill. 

If this verdict goes against Abby Zwerner, the message won’t just hit Newport News. It will hit every classroom in America where a teacher has quietly wondered what they’d do if it happened to them. It will tell them that even if they survive, they’ll be cross-examined about their social lives and text messages. It will tell them that the system that failed to protect them will not just then fail to honor them. But will persecute them.

And what does that do to a profession already on the brink? It tells teachers that their trauma is negotiable, their pain debatable, and their survival optional. It tells them that their worth is conditional — measured not in humanity, but in test scores and public relations.

In my last year in the classroom where we had our big lockdown drill – the one where they bring the police on campus and you don’t leave your room until they unlock the door, my administration failed to unlock not just my door, but the other classes in my wing, An ENTIRE WING of teachers completely forgotten.  Glad that was just a drill, right? 

That’s the real human cost. It isn’t just the bullet. It’s the erosion of trust, the hollowing out of morale, the slow realization that the system you gave your life to will not give its ANYTHING back to you.

But here’s the other truth: every time teachers gather, every time they speak out, every time they decide to tell the truth anyway — that’s an act of resistance. Abby’s case is horrifying, yes. But it’s also a mirror. And what we do with what we see will determine whether that mirror becomes a window to change or another wall we get stuck behind.

Section 8: Broader Systemic Implications  (40:50)

This trial isn’t just about one teacher, one administrator, or one school. It’s about a system being held up to the light. Every testimony, every exhibit, every question in that courtroom reveals something educators have known for years: the scaffolding that’s supposed to protect them is cracked all the way through.

For decades, teachers have been asked to absorb every new expectation the public piles on—academic, social, emotional, even moral—and then to do it all with a smile and without complaint. The message has been clear: you are responsible for everything, but in charge of nothing. We trust you with nothing. This case exposes that contradiction with surgical precision. It shows what happens when responsibility and authority are completely out of balance.

When the counselor says a child might have a gun, and the administrator hesitates; when a teacher follows protocol and still ends up bleeding on her own floor—what you’re seeing isn’t just negligence. You’re seeing the collision point between policy and reality. It’s the moment the system proves it can’t protect the people inside it.

And that’s why educators everywhere are watching this case so closely. This trial lays it bare. Every teacher who has ever been told to “just follow the rules” knows that sometimes the rules are what put you in danger. Every teacher who’s ever been dismissed as dramatic or “overreacting” or “difficult” when raising a concern knows what it feels like to be unheard until it’s too late.

The outcome of this case will ripple far beyond Newport News. Teachers across the country are watching. If Abby Zwerner loses, the message will be unmistakable: that teachers are on their own. That a district can ignore repeated warnings, fail to follow its own safety plan, and still face no real consequences, that it is acceptable to treat teachers as expendable collateral in the name of policy compliance or test-scores. 

There is no behavior glitch, no developmental delay, no “quirk” that makes it acceptable for a teacher to be shot by a six-year-old in front of her students. None. And yet, the defense has floated versions of that argument in the subtext—softly suggesting that because this child was challenging, because he had poor behavioral issues, somehow the danger wasn’t predictable, or worse, that it was inevitable. But inevitability isn’t a defense; it’s an indictment.

If the verdict favors the administrator, it effectively grants legal permission to keep doing what’s already driving teachers away: ignoring valid concerns, prioritizing optics, and using policy as a sword instead of a shield. It tells every district that as long as they can point to the binder of procedures, they’re off the hook—even when those procedures are the problem and/or weren’t followed to begin with.

It also has deep implications for special-education law. If a child requires a parent’s daily presence at school to function safely, that’s a sign the placement needs to be reevaluated. The “Least Restrictive Environment” principle was never meant to mean no boundaries. It was meant to balance inclusion with safety and support. A district that keeps a child in a setting where staff feel unsafe isn’t practicing inclusion; it’s practicing denial. And that denial endangers everyone involved - including the special education student.

Zooming out even further, this case reveals how deeply education has been politicized. In recent years, public discourse has painted teachers as ideologues rather than professionals, as adversaries rather than allies. That cultural shift is more than just noise; it influences juries, policies, and budgets. When the public starts believing that teachers are the problem, it becomes easier for institutions to treat them as expendable.

What we’re seeing in this courtroom is not just a legal defense—it’s a mirror of that narrative. It’s the suggestion that if a teacher shows emotion, she’s unstable; if she seeks therapy, she’s unreliable; if she socializes, she must not be that traumatized. It’s the oldest trick in the book: dehumanize the professional so you don’t have to face the institution’s failure.

And here’s the danger: if the court validates that pattern, it becomes precedent—not just legal precedent, but cultural precedent. It tells every superintendent, every school board, and every teacher in America that a six-year-old bringing a gun to school is somehow “unforeseeable,” even when half the building saw it coming. It tells them that testing schedules and administrative optics outweigh a teacher’s life.

This case is the canary in the coal mine. What happens here will shape how safe teachers feel to speak up, how accountable leaders feel to respond, and how the next generation views the teaching profession itself. Because make no mistake—teachers are watching, parents are watching, and future teachers are watching too. If this case ends with no accountability, many of them will simply walk away.

And when they do, we will lose far more than educators. We will lose the trust that holds the schools together. Because the real lesson children learn from adults isn’t in the curriculum - it’s how we treat the people who care for them. If we choose bureaucracy over humanity, we’re teaching them that courage is optional and compassion is expendable.

That’s the systemic cost. Not just one teacher’s pain, but the erosion of faith in the very idea that schools are safe places to learn and work. And if that faith disappears, rebuilding it will take more than policies or professional development—it will take accountability. It will take leaders willing to stand up and say, “We failed her. And we will not fail the next one.”

 

Section 9: In closing…  (47:47)

As I’ve followed this trial, I keep coming back to the same question: what are we willing to accept?

Because if we accept this — a teacher shot by a six-year-old after multiple warnings, and a system more worried about testing than safety — then we’re saying this is normal.
 We’re saying that educators should expect to be targets.
 We’re saying that the people who dedicate their lives to children are somehow responsible for their own injuries.

And that cannot be who we are.

The truth is that Abby Zwerner did everything right.
She followed protocol.
She trusted the chain of command.
She did what the system trained her to do.
And the system failed her anyway.
She didn’t run from the room for her own safety
She didn’t leave the rest of the students alone with a student she knew had a gun.
She did what she was supposed to do! 

That’s what makes this case so hard to watch — because every teacher listening knows how easily it could have been them. The warnings, the meetings, the quiet feeling of dread. We’ve all lived a smaller version of it. We’ve all felt unsafe at some point and hoped that someone in authority would listen. And too often, no one does.

What’s happening in that courtroom is not just a lawsuit. It’s a referendum on how we value teachers — not with slogans or hashtags, but with policy, protection, and accountability. If leadership can ignore repeated warnings, fail to follow its own safety plan, and still walk away untouched, then the message is clear: teachers are expendable. And once that message is sent, it’s impossible to unhear.

This trial has revealed something we all knew deep down: that the profession has been hollowed out by fear and overreach. Teachers are caught in a paradox — expected to be heroes, but treated as liabilities. Expected to nurture, but never to challenge. Expected to protect students, but not themselves.

If the verdict doesn’t hold leadership accountable, then this isn’t just Abby’s loss. It’s a loss for every educator who’s ever raised a hand to say, “Something’s not right.” It’s a message that their instincts don’t matter. That their lives don’t either.

But I refuse to believe that’s where this story ends. Because while systems can fail, people can still rise. Teachers have always been the conscience of education. They are the ones who stay late to comfort a crying child, who have bought supplies out of their own pockets, who stand between danger and their students without blinking. They are the ones who keep showing up — not because they’re unbreakable, but because they believe in something bigger than fear.

And that belief deserves protection. It deserves respect. It deserves more than thoughts and prayers and after-the-fact press conferences. It deserves leaders who will listen the first time. It deserves policies that make safety a priority, not an afterthought. It deserves a system that values life over liability.

So wherever this verdict lands, my hope is that we remember what’s at stake. Not just one teacher’s pain, but the soul of a profession. Because every time we let bureaucracy drown out bravery, we lose another good teacher. And every time we stand up and say, “This is not acceptable,” we get a little closer to the kind of schools our children — and their teachers — deserve.

Abby Zwerner’s story isn’t over. Neither is ours. What happens next depends on what we’re willing to change, and what we refuse to accept.

So for now, let’s start there — by refusing to accept a system that calls this normal.

Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other.
 And as always, keep choosing courage.

 

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