Kindergartners Are Now Learning Lockdown-Drill Nursery Rhymes in School

Earlier this week, Georgy Cohen got to check out the classroom her 5-year-old daughter will spend every day in come fall, and she saw something that truly shocked her.

"This should not be hanging in my soon-to-be-kindergartener’s classroom." she wrote in a tweet, accompanied by a picture of a poster with a nursery rhyme designed to teach kids what to do in an active shooter situation. Cohen posted it a little over 24 hours ago, and it already has over 18,000 retweets.

The nursery rhyme can be sung to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." "Lockdown, lockdown, Lock the door/Shut the lights off, Say no more/Go behind the desk and hide/Wait until it’s safe inside/Lockdown, Lockdown it’s all done/Now it’s time to have some fun!"

“It’s jarring,” Cohen, a Massachusetts resident, told The Boston Globe on Thursday. “When I was in kindergarten, we had fire drills. It was different, we didn’t have these same types of threats.”

She doesn't fault the school for having in there, because she knows they're just trying to protect children, but it was hard for her to imagine children singing it in such a playful way.

"These are the things they unfortunately have to do,” Cohen said. “I get it."

Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone and Superintendent Mary Skipper released a joint statement to the Globe and said that this is, unfortunately, the world we live in today. “Just like school fire drills, lockdown drills have sadly become a common practice in schools, and educators do everything they can to reduce students’ anxiety and stress.”

There are over 2,000 comments on Cohen's original tweet, and she said she's happy it's eliciting such a reaction by people because it's important not to normalize school shootings.

“To be shocked by it is important. To see that absurdity and horror and have that sick feeling in your stomach is important,” she said. “Stay outraged. And if it gets somebody to do something, to give money to an organization or to call their representatives . . . then great, I think that that’s important.”