On Wednesday morning, teachers and students across the nation walked into school hallways and classrooms as usual, less than 24 hours after news of another mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Students still had to take final exams, and teachers graded papers and continued lessons as usual. From the outside, it might have seemed like any other day.

But the familiar knot in Chanea Bond's stomach told her otherwise.

"I saw colleagues crying today," Bond said Wednesday. Bond, an English and literature teacher in Fort Worth, Texas, is about 350 miles from the shooting—where less than a day earlier, 19 children and 2 adults were shot and killed inside a classroom. Bond said she and her colleagues are experiencing a range of emotions from fear and helplessness to tension and anxiety.

"We're just balls of stress and tension waiting for the next thing to happen," she said. "Our bodies are exhausted, we can't sleep, and many of us are physically suffering."

Yet Bond, and thousands of teachers like her across the nation, still have to carry on.

"Because if I don't, everything falls apart."

Teachers repeatedly traumatized

The emotional, physical, and behavioral side effects reported by educators nationwide after the Uvalde massacre are nothing new. Many teachers described similar ripple effects after mass school shootings at Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Parkland, Santa Fe, Oxford, and others.

Addison Duane, a Ph.D. in educational psychology from Wayne State University and a former elementary school teacher, said these reactions are symptoms of trauma stress. Duane's research expertise includes trauma and race issues in schools.

After a school shooting, the effects of direct, indirect, or vicarious trauma can be wide-ranging: emotionally, it may manifest as a sense of loss of control, increased anger, or heightened aggression; behaviorally, withdrawal; and physically, headaches, stomachaches, insomnia, or loss of appetite.

"No one says, 'Hey, I know this is really hard, I know this is impossible.' We're just expected to carry all the burdens that come with working with young people."

— Chanea Bond, English and literature teacher in Fort Worth, Texas

Bond described feeling ringing in her ears as she walked from the parking lot to the school gate on Wednesday morning.

"Our bodies go through that trauma over and over again," she said.

The trauma after a school shooting can also compound existing trauma from systemic racism, especially for those working in or living in historically marginalized communities, such as Black, Hispanic, and low-income students.

Robb Elementary School is one example: according to district data, 90% of its students are Hispanic and 87% come from economically disadvantaged families.

Duane said the layering of trauma has now become "an omnipresent part of the American experience."

Against this backdrop, teachers are still expected to continue teaching.

"No one says, 'Hey, I understand this is really hard, I understand this is impossible,'" Bond said. "We're just expected to carry all the burdens that come with working with young people."

Teachers are caring for the social and emotional health of the children they serve while themselves reporting higher levels of stress, burnout, and fatigue.

"This has a ripple effect on those around us," Duane said. "Think of a classroom that's often overcrowded and under-resourced—you name it. This trickle-down effect is very real and can have quite serious consequences for the children in it."

Students experience 'slowly rolling trauma'

On April 20, 1999, seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killing 15 and wounding 24, an event then recorded as the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

Many of today's educators, who were still in elementary or middle school at the time, recall it as something unimaginable.

More than two decades later, the event has dropped to fourth deadliest, surpassed by Sandy Hook in 2012, Parkland in 2018, and Uvalde this week.

In the nearly decade since the last elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, more than 900 shootings have been reported on school grounds, according to the White House.

As teachers see their own demographic's death toll in national headlines, so do their students.

The result, teachers fear, is a generation of students becoming increasingly desensitized to violence.

"The violence is right in front of them," Bond said.

a95d3ca73fb62e7a7345c0631d48afd67942a81b310a477d1d4c39ea15b0ca3d.jpg A child passes through a police line after the Uvalde shooting, which killed 21 people, including 19 children.

Photo credit: Brandon Bell via Getty Images

Many of these students have also recently lost family, friends, or neighbors to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Even if we try to keep children somewhat insulated... this has been a slowly rolling trauma for years," said Gerard Lawson. Lawson, a licensed professional counselor who helped coordinate the response to the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, specializes in crisis management and is a professor at Virginia Tech's College of Education and past president of the American Counseling Association.

School safety, disaster response, and trauma experts recommend that teachers and education leaders build or strengthen relationships with students, foster peer connections, and work to reassure students they are safe—tasks made more difficult by the pandemic's impact on school connectedness and students' social and emotional health.

Many have repeatedly called on school principals, superintendents, counselors, and psychologists to lead in creating a positive school climate.

"But the reality is, this is just another example that no community is immune," Lawson said.

However, students in low-income communities and some Black and Hispanic communities are more likely to face barriers to accessing mental health services due to stigma, lack of or inadequate health insurance, and shortages of resources like psychologists.

In fields where "trauma-informed practice" has become a buzzword in these historically marginalized communities, teachers describe significant trauma and inadequacy. Large class sizes, high student-to-psychologist ratios, and lack of professional development are just some of the concerns.

"It doesn't scare me that someone might come in and hurt me and my students. What scares me is that the people already here might act out because they can't process their own trauma," Bond said. "The citizens we send out into the world—those are the ones more likely to be dangerous because they don't know any better."

'I didn't know how to be there for them'

After Uvalde, teachers across the nation took to social media to say that many school leaders' lack of resources and empathy compounded their stress.

Yet this situation is not uncommon in these contexts—the sentiment dates back at least a decade to Sandy Hook.

"I'll never forget that day when my eighth graders pulled out their phones at the end of the day and saw the Sandy Hook news in real time," said one person who was a middle school teacher in Massachusetts at the time. "I didn't know how to be there for them." The former teacher requested anonymity because she now works in curriculum publishing and is not authorized to speak publicly. She said she frequently visits school buildings in her role.

Now, with states like Florida banning social-emotional learning under the guise of "critical race theory," teachers may find it harder to have unrestricted conversations with students.

"They (students) need school to maintain their mental health, but they're not safe at school because they could be hit by a bullet. They can't wear masks, but people in the community are sick," Bond said, referring to states that have banned mask mandates in schools. "It feels like we're always at the center of these moral and political debates without the resources to help us cope."

But in 2012, the former Massachusetts teacher recalled, she reviewed safety procedures with students in case a gunman entered the building. She said she had a secret tool of her own: a hammer in her drawer, ready to break a window to evacuate students during a lockdown. She recalled many colleagues also kept hammers in their drawers for the same reason.

"There were two plans: the official 'duck and cover in the corner' plan, and the 'if that really happens, the hammer is here' plan," she said.

In 2016, after seven years of teaching, she eventually left the profession, describing her parents' initial reaction as one of relief.

After Uvalde, other teachers—those who had already reported high levels of burnout and stress after the pandemic—may also choose to walk away.

"Teacher retention is already a problem, and this (shooting) is likely to exacerbate it," said Julia Martin. Martin, a former education policy adviser to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, is now legislative director at the law firm Brustein & Manasevit.

According to a survey released in March by the American Psychological Association, about one-third of teachers reported experiencing at least one incident of verbal harassment or threats of violence from students during the pandemic, and nearly 50% said they planned or wanted to quit or transfer.

"The shadow of school shootings—with two teachers killed in this one—will certainly deter many who were thinking of becoming teachers, and could be the last straw for those already considering leaving the profession," Martin said.

Bond, who has been teaching for seven years, said she plans to eventually leave the classroom for good.

"I would love to just teach, but that's a luxury we can't afford right now," she said. "I don't know if I can survive another decade if this keeps up."