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Why Are There Cages Around Our Schools?

Because this is how we live now.

Vanessa Torre
4 min readSep 11, 2019
Photo by Scott Webb via Unsplash

He was walking a little slow. A sign of his age. His daughter was a bit ahead of him, trying to set a faster pace. The game started at 6pm. He was there to see his granddaughter play in the varsity volleyball game. I was in the same place for the same game.

My daughter’s school is beautiful. Gorgeous desert colors, browns and purples, designed to blend in with the small surrounding mountains. One thing stands out, though. The beige colored wrought iron fence that surrounds the whole school.

As he walked up to the gate to the gymnasium, he noticed.

“Well, looks like there’s a cage around the entire school! They must really want to keep the kids in,” he told his daughter.

I held inside what I wanted to tell him.

No, sir. It’s not to keep the kids in. There’s more that the school has to worry about these days than kids skipping class. See how the top of the fence bends to the outside, not the inside? It’s to keep other people out.

The fence is there to make sure no one comes in with an assault rifle and guns down our children. This is how we live now.

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Vanessa Torre
Vanessa Torre

Written by Vanessa Torre

Top 10 feminist writer. Writing, coaching, and relentlessly hyping women in midilfe. linktr.ee/Vanessaltorre Email: vanessa@vanessatorre.com

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