It Breaks My Heart Headline in Education Week October 1, 2014: “Pentagon Program Provides Surplus Weapons to Districts.” Two weeks ago I returned to the small, rural elementary school where I held my first job as principal to attend a ribbon cutting for a wonderful new addition allowing the school to expand its offerings across the board. Over 30 years ago the only surplus we received was office supplies and occasional special programs of paperback books or colored markers. Security at the school was the evening custodians remembering to lock the three entrances. Threats came in the form of a local bull who’d wandered onto the playground one morning during recess. (His owner, an eighth grade girl named Ann, calmly put her finger through his nose ring and led him home, but not until after some apparently entertaining, misguided heroics on my part.) Back then the only uniforms on our campus were for sports teams and the occasional volunteers during Fire Prevention Week. Since those days, I spent another 15 years intermittently in different districts into the first decade of this century, so I know the changes. I vividly recall the first time my life was threatened by an angry teenager, the one time a parent arrived in my office with a pistol in his shoulder holster (it remained there), the time we had the full state police bomb squad investigating an unusual package discovered at the main entrance, the early and unusually warm spring morning I spent watching our baseball teams practice after I’d seen the reports from Columbine. I’ve seen the changes, and that headline breaks my heart.