On Parenting is a new column about raising children in an occasionally waterless city.

Writer Tom Nash is a former Style Weekly reporter and proxy for FOIA nonprofit MuckRock who parents in Richmond with Catherine MacDonald. She is working on a column about Medicaid and seeking input here.

They will be writing this shared column on an occasional basis about timely issues and concerns relevant to growing up in Richmond—at all our ages and stages. 

I remember being 11 years old, in 1997, sitting cross-legged in a classroom in Vienna, Va., when a guidance counselor came to scold us. A student at a nearby school had been shot dead when a gun his friend was holding went off from the next room. 

The guidance counselor was livid. She would scare every student she could out of handling a gun. Don’t be stupid. Don’t touch guns. Don’t do stupid things. 

Problem solved.

I remember being in a middle school classroom, watching Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on CNN in 1999, seeing the difference between a stupid thing and an evil thing. 

Stupid and evil things kept happening. 

I remember sitting at an internet station in Ireland in 2007, logging online from an Internet cafe to ask my friend at Virginia Tech if he was OK. Newspaper stands in Ireland had gory front page photos of the massacre. His friend, Ryan Clark, had been the first person killed. 

I remember sitting at my cubicle in Boston, surrounded by people who live and breathe headlines, feeling the air sucked out of the room when we saw how many elementary students had been killed in Newtown, Conn. 

Five years after Virginia Tech, 14 years after Columbine, we could still be shocked. 

The world became more evil, more stupid that day. It hasn’t stopped. Instead of getting guns out of the hands of children, we’ve spent decades updating policies—from not showing live coverage of shootings to children drilling which corner of the room is safest. 

The best trick the gun lobby ever played was to separate guns and violence. Gun owners claim that violence is inflicted by people, and people can’t be stopped, except by people with guns. 

Those people with guns have young children who, twice recently in Virginia alone, make news when they take those guns to school. The child who shot their teacher in Newport News was known to have a gun. And the child carrying one in their backpack at Maymont Preschool was spotted without the aid of a clear backpack rule. 

The adults in these kids’ lives are at fault. But in Richmond, we have shifted blame to elementary school students. This has been the first school year young children must wear clear backpacks to school.

The best trick the gun lobby ever played was to separate guns and violence.

We can see now that the counselor whose angry face remains imprinted in my memory was wrong. It’s the parent who did the stupid thing by leaving a gun unsecured. And prosecutors are starting to agree.

RPS however, moved quickly and without full input to push this backpack policy.

In parenting, so much is out of our control. Policies about masks and vaccines, for example, belong in the hands of experts. The rest of it requires as much information as possible to help make informed decisions, or the trust that we’re doing our best. 

This clear backpack policy reflects neither. As parents, we are letting RPS indulge in a naive fantasy while entrusting them to teach our children to see the world as it is.

Curious to see if anyone else was annoyed, I filed a Freedom of Information request with Richmond Public Schools for parent reaction. Because what parents can’t control, we can FOIA.

RPS sent me correspondence from parents, upset and unheard. Officials issued a prepared statement in response. A School Board member offered to drop off backpacks to a parent’s door. There was not one hint of listening to feedback.

“In the last two (2) weeks of school, my child’s school had three (3) shelter in place lockdowns because of gun related events that occurred outside of the school,” one parent wrote. “Perhaps those walking on city streets should be included in the clear backpack protocol.”

Another incident in 2023 shut schools completely: the shooting death of a graduating high schooler, gunned down just after a downtown theater ceremony. A clear backpack would not have prevented this. 

But attention spans are short, and RPS has long benefitted from waiting for outrage to fade. 

I asked my friend Ryan McElveen, Fairfax County School Board member at-large: Why is it so hard for school officials to see that clear backpacks fix none of the problems caused by guns? 

“In the U.S., we put the onus on school systems to solve society’s problems,” he told me. “School boards are left to come up with solutions while state and federal governments twiddle their thumbs. This results in localities grasping at everything they can to solve the problem, even if the solutions are stupid.”

“And frankly,” he added, “clear backpacks are stupid.”

Ryan and I grew up in the deadly shadow of NRA headquarters. We lived through a changing reality where guns won and childhood lost. In 1999, light-up shoes were coveted by preschoolers. A new generation still covets them—but parents get told light-up shoes are blinking targets.

A few months into the new Trump era, amid a minute-by-minute onslaught of harm, this is one area where we can reduce it. For Trump, a wealthier, whiter school district (Fairfax) being treated with more respect and trust than students in one that is not (Richmond), is “law and order” restored. 

After a school year experiencing normalized absurdity, RPS students deserve a School Board that flips this around. A School Board that isn’t shrugging toward Trump’s racist, police-state dystopia. 

I have hope that the School Board will find its way into turning the backpacks opaque again. It’s too late to have kept one out of my child’s hands. At an RPS kindergarten “signing day” on April 17, 4-and-5-year-olds were asked “Blue, red, or pink?” and handed a backpack that was none of those things. 

My kid has clutched it tight, proud and unaware of this token of mistrust. It’s been sitting by the door, calling out to me that the violence I grew up with will be my first-born’s problem soon.