Columbia, SC (WLTX) - Teachers worry about the safety of their students every day.
"Everyone has to be cognizant of this and trained and know what to do in the case of an emergency," Zach Lowe said.
Lowe teaches at Maywood Middle School in Sumter County. We asked him what he's told his students about the shooting that took place Wednesday in Florida.
"It's really making sure that they can realize that there is bad in the world and that also the steps they can do to try and fix that, but also in coping with some of those things,” he said.
Lowe isn't the only teacher we spoke with. Paula Gordon taught middle schoolers throughout Richland County for 35 years before retiring in 2013.
"Safety is always the first thing you think about with your students and keeping them safe and talking to them in a way that doesn't frighten them because we thought it was always important for their parents to be able to tell them as much as they needed to know or as little as they needed to know,” Gordon said.
She said things have changed since she first started teaching.
"The weather and fire were probably the biggest concerns that we had and so things have changed a lot, but society has changed a lot too," she said.
Now I.D.s, sign-in-sheets and School Resource Officers are standard. More than anything Gordon says if you see something, say something and push to have honest and open relationships with your students.
"Because if they feel like they can come and talk to you about something, if they know that somebody has a gun or they know that somebody is thinking about something, they can come and tell you even if they are scared," she said.
Lowe said he can't find a rhyme or reason for why these events continue to happen, but he hopes that caring for the mental health of students across the country will become paramount in prevention.
"So that we are necessarily not reactive and try to react to some of these events, but rather being proactive and making sure that we can do whatever we can as a nurturer, as a mentor, as a teacher to make sure that won't happen in the first place," he said.