Back to School Essentials Used in Another Way, A Gut-Wrenching Way
I always loved watching the advertisements that showed students eager to get all of their school supplies for the upcoming school term. The reason I believed I loved them so much was because I was one of those students. I loved color coordinating my binders with my folders and getting the colorful mechanical pencils and highlighters. I cannot really explain the reason behind my excitement and enjoyment of doing those things, but the good thing was I was always coming to school prepared. However, this PSA showed me that you can never be too prepared.
Back in 2019, the anti-violence nonprofit, Sandy Hook Promise, which was created by parents of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre shooting, decided to create a PSA for the upcoming school year. This PSA first starts upbeat and exciting just like all the other back to school ads we usually see, then it begins to become dark by the young students using simple school supplies as emergency survival tools during a school shooting. The part that is the most gut-wrenching is the final scene, that shows a girl huddling in the bathroom stating that she’s happy she finally has her phone to keep in contact with her mother. Right after she texts her mother “I love you”, you hear footsteps as if the gunman has entered the restroom and then the commercial ends.
This advertisement truly moved me in many ways to where it made like it but also hate it at the same time. I liked it because it sparked awareness and as a reminder that school shootings occur far too often to not be talked about more. I also liked how it grabbed viewers’ attention by starting off as a normal advertisement but then progressively turns into the message it was trying to promote.
After watching this PSA, it caused me to do more research on school shootings and also reflect on what I remember learning when the Sandy Hook shooting took place in 2012. Even though, I was only 12 years old, I vividly remember our teachers discussing with us about it and hearing about it on the news for a while. I had also learned that my father attended Sandy Hook Elementary School as a child. In 2016, I actually got to visit his childhood home and toured the town and saw the new school that was built for Sandy Hook Elementary. The research I found was that there are more than 228,000 students who have witnessed a school shooting since the shooting that occurred at Columbine High School in 1999. This number is extremely too high, and I hope that one day we can find an end to these unnecessary shootings.
