AP

Assistant Principal's voice over the loud speaker signaling and directing the lockdown drills.

Assistant Principal's hand on the limp pulse of the second-grade girl who had a seizure on a scorching fun-filled field day.

Assistant Principal's heart torn to shreds by police brutality  signaling a never-ending police department hunting season.

Is it a season if there is only one?

Assistant Principal's distressed soles walking the halls after the last shots when the first responders arrive to secure the building and take the wounded and escort the traumatized youth who never thought it would be in their school that the Second Amendment would rear its assassin head in the name of a colonial white privilege.

Assistant Principal's ears ringing from a marathon of phone calls to parents, grandmothers, aunts, and mentors providing referrals that will never materialize in this vast healthcare and food desert. Calls that transmit as cries to doctors and therapists to once and for all set up practice in a school building where 2300 students share one therapist present only one day each week. Begging for a practice of routine empathy, care, and health because who can learn without it?

Assistant Principal's eyes witnessing the state's neglect of children who were never greeted with boot straps upon arriving on dry land unlike Columbus and their counterparts on the Northside of the city. Children whose parents want the same things as my parents and your parents for their children, our children. Parents relegated to the "we need them but we don't want them" cohort caught in the undercurrents of the supremacist othering of all people South of the interstate or the border. Anyone with the melanin they so much envy and emulate by all means necessary.

Assistant Principals assisting principals

Assist in principles

Assist and

Assistant