COPIUM: Let's Wait for Further Instructions

 

Pause. Exams ongoing. Don't shoot.

Mental health cannot thrive where safety is uncertain. Yet students are expected to cope, keep up with their studies, and carry on as gun-violence threats turn schools into places of fear. Apparently, coping is part of the curriculum now.

Just another school day, as long as you ignore the possibility of getting shot.

I experienced this contradiction firsthand when a gun-violence threat circulated around campus during examinations. What should have been ordinary exam anxiety became something far more serious: an entire college was placed under lockdown. While I was expected to focus on my grades, I was also checking on friends who still rushed to school despite the threat because they feared missing classes.

Apparently, the only thing more urgent than a gun threat was the attendance sheet.

A student's school experience should be focused on exams, school activities, friendships, and the ordinary anxieties of student life. Instead, there is now a lingering threat in the air: Will I make it home today? Somehow, the classroom has become a place where students are expected to prepare for their futures while worrying whether they will get to have one. Surprise quizzes are supposed to be the scary part of school.

This is no longer a distant concern for Filipinos. In June, a shooting at San Jose National High School in Tacloban City killed three students and injured at least 20 others. In August, a shooting at Ateneo de Zamboanga University in Zamboanga City left one student and the student gunman dead and injured others. In September, a shooting at Banga National High School in South Cotabato killed two students, left the 16-year-old gunman dead, while other students were injured.

For many Filipinos, school shootings once felt like a distant phenomenon, something associated with another country, another reality. That distance has disappeared. Turns out, “that only happens abroad” wasn't exactly a foolproof security plan.

The consequences extend beyond those who are physically injured. A study by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that, following the 2018 Parkland shooting at a neighboring school, students in a Florida school district were less likely to feel safe at school and more likely to miss school because they felt unsafe. Another study by Hodges et al. (2023), examining more than 211,000 U.S. adolescents, found that high school shootings were associated with 20% greater odds of students avoiding school because they felt unsafe.

School shootings change how students experience places that should be safe. A classroom once associated with learning can become a source of fear; a hallway leading to the next class can become a potential site of danger. Even students who were nowhere near a shooting can begin to wonder whether it could happen to them.

The Department of Education (DepEd) has responded to the recent incidents by calling for tighter school security, while existing policies already require schools to monitor learner safety and provide learner support services. Its 2025 reminders cited security procedures, visible security personnel, incident-prevention policies, and mental-health support.

But having policies is not the same as making students feel protected. A policy can look reassuring on paper. Unfortunately, students have to live in the real world, where paper has yet to stop a bullet.

Innocent lives have been lost, and families are left grieving. Those who witnessed such atrocities are left carrying memories they never should have had to make. When material left by perpetrators reveals what they describe as darkness within, we are left with difficult questions about what happened before the violence and what could have been done differently. But while we try to understand what happened inside a perpetrator's mind, we must not lose sight of what failed outside it.

Mental health cannot become the scapegoat

The World Health Organization's (WHO) theme for World Mental Health Day 2026 is “Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change.” The campaign calls for people with lived experience to help shape the policies and services that affect them. Being heard means little if their experiences do not lead to meaningful action.

This matters in schools, where students' mental health is inseparable from the environments in which they learn. The WHO, UNESCO, and UNICEF's Teaching with Care guide emphasizes safe, inclusive learning environments, positive relationships, early recognition of distress, and access to appropriate support. Yet mental health support cannot compensate for an environment that leaves students fearing for their safety.

Counseling can help students process fear and recover from trauma. These services are essential, but how can counseling alone remove the fear of a gun being pointed at your face? It is a fear deep-breathing exercises cannot resolve. Supporting students' mental health must go hand in hand with protecting their physical safety.

Mental illness should not become a convenient, catch-all explanation for gun violence. Focusing solely on a perpetrator's mental state risks diverting attention from other factors, including firearm access, security failures, and threats that go unaddressed. Mental health struggles neither excuse violence nor absolve institutions of their responsibility to address these failures.

Recent school shootings in the Philippines have raised concerns about firearm access and the online influences surrounding young people. Investigations into the Tacloban and Zamboanga cases have raised questions about minors' exposure to online extremist content, while the Banga incident has prompted renewed calls to address online threats and strengthen child protection. These cases underscore the need to examine not only the individuals involved but also the environments and systems that may enable violence.

It is difficult to comprehend that someone could deliberately take innocent lives. Perhaps that is why we seek explanations that make the incomprehensible easier to understand. But explanation is not justification. It is easier to blame a diagnosis than to examine a system. A diagnosis makes for a convenient headline; investigating a chain of failures demands much harder questions. Empathy should never require us to place a perpetrator's suffering above the lives of the victims.

Understanding what leads to violence is necessary, but prevention must also account for those left living in fear. We cannot reduce school violence to social media, academic pressure, bullying, or mental illness alone. Nor can we treat the aftermath as a problem students must manage on their own.

Schools should allow students to grow, make mistakes, and ask for help without feeling that failure makes them worthless. This does not mean academic pressure causes school shootings. It means students cannot be expected to perform at their best while questioning whether their campus is safe. That is not resilience; it is an unreasonable burden to place on them. It is also a remarkably inefficient study technique.

Research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identifies supportive school environments and connections with caring adults as protective factors for young people. Schools must therefore take students' concerns seriously, respond to threats promptly, and ensure that safety measures are consistently implemented—not only after a tragedy makes their absence impossible to ignore. Depending on the setting, these measures may include controlled entry points, credible threat-reporting systems, emergency protocols, and appropriate firearm safeguards.

Listen to students themselves

If this year's World Mental Health Day calls for lived experiences to shape real change, students must be part of the conversation.

Students need to know where to turn when they feel threatened, whether they will be taken seriously, and whether the people responsible for their safety will actually act when they ask for help. They are not security experts, nor should they be expected to carry the responsibility of preventing violence themselves. But they are the people inside the classrooms. They know which threats are dismissed as jokes, which concerns disappear into bureaucracy, which spaces feel vulnerable, and which adults they can actually trust.

Their lived experience is not an inconvenience to institutional decision-making; it is information that matters. Listening to students cannot mean inviting them to speak and thanking them for their courage. If their experiences are heard but nothing changes, what exactly has been accomplished?

Students deserve to walk into a classroom and think about the lesson ahead of them, not the possibility of violence. They deserve to worry about an examination without simultaneously wondering whether an alarming message circulating around campus is real. They deserve to make mistakes, ask for help, and grow without being consumed by fear.

If we genuinely care about students' mental health, we must care about the environments in which that mental health is being shaped. Counseling, psychological support, and understanding matter, but so do prevention, security, accountability, and the basic assurance that the institution entrusted with educating students will also protect them.

Hearing students cannot stop at listening. When students say they are afraid, institutions must respond; when they report threats, institutions must act. Their safety cannot become a priority only when tragedy makes the headlines.

The headlines will fade, but the responsibility to keep students safe should not fade with them. Violence does not wait for us to remember. Students should not have to cope with institutional inaction as though it were another ordinary part of school life.

A school should allow students to live, not merely survive.

Written by Alitheia

Proofread by Frank Ian Flores