Like most people, I got into education for the free cafeteria lunches, prom chaperoning duties and constant tampering of adolescent existential dread. Kidding, of course. Before going any further I should confess that I work at a well-resourced independent school and the cafeteria pizza is pretty good. I have a lot of autonomy and a wonderful cast of administrators and coworkers—I’ve got it better than most. But the truth is, no matter where you are, working in education in 2026 is challenging.

There’s a tiny sliver of dread that’s never completely absent.

When I was in high school 20 years ago, the routine safety issues I remember were bomb threats (always false alarms) and tornado warnings (also false alarms, at least in west Michigan, where we would hunker on the bathroom floor, which now strikes me as pretty gross). I don’t remember ever being afraid of either.

But things are different now—even from when I first began teaching in 2013. Then, we had two security cameras on our whole campus and not a pane of bulletproof glass in sight. Now, there are anxiety-inducing professional development (PD) days every year that have included someone firing live ammunition in our building with a bullet catcher so we know what an automatic rifle sounds like being fired in a school hallway. We have Stop the Bleed kits in every classroom. I have practiced placing a tourniquet on a coworker just in case. And while I’m glad to know where my hard corners are and thankful my school invests in trainings and shatterproof glass, I’m haunted by imagining what that obligation means, wondering how many seconds it will take me to lock my door.

There’s a fear and responsibility to being an educator that I never anticipated.

So why do I do it? There are days of heart-wrenching PD and days when I am contractually obligated to play dodgeball before lunch when I ask myself, what am I doing with my life?

You might think the answer is that I do it for the kids. And while that’s the equivalent of the Sunday-school answer (always Jesus) of education, so it’s never wrong, it’s not really my answer.

Lest I incriminate myself too much, I’ll say that I do love the kids: the girl who folded five paper cranes and left them on my desk after I taught her English class; the boy who printed off his college acceptance letter and couldn’t wait to show me; the ones who graduate and still text me pictures of their dorm room or send me postcards from their semester abroad.

But the kids come and go. I’m in my thirteenth year at the same high school, and I’ve had favorite students graduate over and over. Some, horrifyingly, are even married with their own kids now. But what hasn’t changed are the relationships I cherish with many of my colleagues.

The antidote to the fear and the dodgeball, for me, is the Safety Committee.

The Safety Committee is a made-up committee that actually has nothing to do with safety. Instead, as far as I can tell, a math teacher had worked a former job where a group of colleagues formed a “safety committee” that was actually a ruse for going to happy hour. He invited some teachers to a safety meeting at a bar down the street one Friday after school, and the tradition stuck. A new faculty member has since taken on the role of Chief Safety Officer and periodically sends an email calling us to order.

Everyone’s welcome. Every email ends with a reminder that you can invite anyone else who may want to join, new faculty are always included on emails at the beginning of the year, and counselors and school nurses drink for free.

The invitations themselves bring levity even when I can’t attend a meeting. They’ll often highlight mock safety concerns around school, such as standing on wheeled furniture to hang bulletin board décor, walking down the highway in a single file line when the field trip bus breaks down, students throwing out their backs carting around increasingly heavy objects on “anything but a backpack” day, the cleanliness of the wrestling room after a school dance, student drivers peeling out of the parking lot at 3:05 pm, or the AP Lang teacher’s concerning practice of coming across particularly acerbic quotations from essays and announcing, “That would be a good prom theme!” (e.g. “cultural rot and degradation,” alternate prom theme 2022).

Talk too much about work and you have to buy fries for the table. And, like muting your mandatory bloodborne pathogen training in a hidden browser, wearing school-branded clothing and discussing students by name are discouraged.

Laughing around a table about pep rallies gone awry reminds me that we don’t do our work alone. We do it in a community. I’ve chaperoned school trips where the teachers sneak out of their cabins after the kids go to bed and meet up to play Family Feud until well past midnight. I’ve laughed until I cried about the Spanish teacher who mimed rolling dice when her students didn’t understand the Spanish word for it and accidentally found herself making a rude gesture in front of a class full of teenagers. I’ll spare you the 6-7 pieces of youth vernacular I’ve picked up and use unashamedly.

And so, while the safety committee purportedly has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with 2-for-1 beers, I’ve come to realize it is where I find a sense of safety. That joy and community are what make me come back and do this work again, year after year, in spite of the difficulty.

I care deeply about my students’ physical safety. I hope the limits of that are never tested. But safety comes in many forms. For me, the countermeasure to danger outside my control is the knowledge that I’m showing up alongside others who also care deeply about their students and each other. Side by side, we eat waffle fries, write detentions, proctor standardized tests, practice lockdown drills, pray for snow days, and tell stories. I hope one of those things won’t always be on a list of teacher responsibilities, but in the meantime, I’ll reject cynicism because for every news story about a hurt person who terrorizes a school or concert, there are probably a thousand English teachers who show up to their student’s games, who stay after school to help with an essay, who say I see you. I’ll defy apathy because I see brilliant, deeply empathetic, students making their debut in the world. Students, humans, who will leave the world better than they found it. And I celebrate the paper cranes, the college acceptance letters, and hopefully many more plates of table fries.

I care deeply about my students’ physical safety. I hope the limits of that are never tested. But safety comes in many forms. For me, the countermeasure to danger outside my control is the knowledge that I’m showing up alongside others who also care deeply about their students and each other. Side by side, we eat waffle fries, write detentions, proctor standardized tests, practice lockdown drills, pray for snow days, and tell stories. I hope one of those things won’t always be on a list of teacher responsibilities, but in the meantime, I’ll reject cynicism because for every news story about a hurt person who terrorizes a school or concert, there are probably a thousand English teachers who show up to their student’s games, who stay after school to help with an essay, who say I see you. I’ll defy apathy because I see brilliant, deeply empathetic, students making their debut in the world. Students, humans, who will leave the world better than they found it. And I celebrate the paper cranes, the college acceptance letters, and hopefully many more plates of table fries.

Yours in Safety,

Kelli Wisthoff