[box type=”info” align=”” class=”” width=””]Choosing Hope: Moving Forward from Life’s Darkest Hours By Kaitlin Roig-Debellis Putnam, 2015 256 pp., $26.95[/box]
Three years ago a young man named Adam Lanza stormed into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. and fatally shot 20 students and six staff members, including the principal.
When teacher Kaitlin Roig heard gunfire and shattering glass, she immediately herded her 16 first graders into a tiny 3-by-4-foot bathroom — quick thinking that may have saved their lives. The gunman entered an adjacent classroom, where he killed several first graders.
Roig-DeBellis [she has since married] has now written a disappointing book about that awful day and her decision to leave teaching temporarily to promote a non-profit she founded with the awkward name Classes 4 Classes to teach children positive values such as compassion and service.
After the deadly rampage, the author understandably was paralyzed by fear. When school finally resumed, she insisted on extra security measures for her classroom, but the principal and superintendent rejected her requests. She was asked to take a leave of absence. She has yet to return.
One wishes that the author had gone deeper into the effect of the mass killings on her students, both at the time and in subsequent years.
We get only a vague sense of what it must have been like for a teacher and her 6-and-7-year-old first-graders to be held in a tiny bathroom listening to gunfire, and fearing that the killer might break into their hiding place at any minute.
Roig-DeBellis’s account lacks emotional depth. The focus is clearly on her. She includes numerous quotes from students and others assuring us that she was a “great teacher” or “the best teacher.” She proudly points to her numerous awards, magazine profiles and speaking engagements.
Roig-DeBellis was offended when critics suggested that she cared more about her growing celebrity status than about her students.
“Choosing Hope” is marked by pedestrian writing and multiple clichés, such as good teachers “plant seeds”; Roig-DeBellis was not “comfortable in my own skin”; and when she spoke, “there was not a dry eye in the house.”
What are we to make of this statement – “There’s nothing positive about being negative.” Where were her editors?
Roig-DeBellis never mentions the killer’s name, explaining in an interview that she wants to speak only the names of the “26 angels” and “not the name of a monster.”
Surprisingly, she does not address the critical issue of gun control. Lanza blasted his way into the school armed with an assault rifle and two pistols after first fatally shooting his mother in her nearby house.
Surely this awful tragedy awaits a deeper, more authoritative account.
Only days after the publication of “Choosing Hope,” nine students were killed in a mass shooting at a community college in Oregon.
