Lollipops, Buckets, Hockey Pucks: How Teachers Prepare For A Mass Shooting

Tell Williams, a teacher in Philadelphia, keeps lollipops in his desk in case of an active shooter.

About a decade ago, the school Williams teaches at had been put on lockdown because a drunk man at the apartment complex across the street had a rifle. After the lockdown was lifted, Williams and his fellow teachers gathered in the hallway at the end of the day to talk about what had just happened. Williams’ fellow teacher told him that she keeps lollipops in the desk for her kindergarteners when there is an active shooter threat.

“I was thinking, like, why would you do that?” Williams told HuffPost. “And she was, like, ‘Well, because if the kids are eating them, they can’t cry and they can’t talk.’ I buy them now, but it was such a horrific moment being, like, Oh, my God. That is the only safety measure in keeping kids calm.”

By the time Williams was in his second lockdown, he had the lollipops ready. He took his students into the classroom’s bathroom, put his jacket under the door to block out the light and turned on his phone flashlight.

“I was making shadow puppets on the ceiling, trying to distract them so they wouldn’t cry and be scared,” he told HuffPost. “And that’s our safety measures as teachers. You have to convince the kids to stay quiet, to not scare them because we don’t want them to be scared and cry, but we also want them to take it seriously and not giggle.”

Williams initially told the lollipop story on TikTok just hours after a shooter killed two students and two teachers and injured nine others in a school in Winder, Georgia. The suspect in the Georgia shooting is just 14 years old, and Georgia does not have secure storage laws requiring gun owners to lock up their firearms to prevent kids from using