783: Kids These Days

Chana Joffe-Walt

It's This American Life. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt, sitting in for Ira Glass. Last fall, I saw this video from a high school in Michigan, and maybe it wouldn't have stayed with me in the way that it has if it weren't for all the many things that have happened since then that keep reminding me of this video. It's turned into a sort of reference point in my head for a dynamic I keep seeing repeated.

The video is from September 2021, last fall, in Michigan, about 20 miles outside of Ann Arbor. It's early morning, right before the school day. A group of parents and their high schoolers are loosely crowded around the door to a school, a mostly white crowd. There's a police officer with Top Gun sunglasses.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The officer is calmly-- one might say, patronizingly-- repeating, "If you're going to go into the building, you have to have a mask on." Nobody in this video is wearing a mask. About 20 teenagers are standing between the officer and the door to their school, looking like all teenagers do when they're waiting for anything-- a little bored, a little blank, lots of crossed arms-- as this goes on.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The officer has just said, no, you can't go in. And the parents start waving the kids toward the door, yelling, you can go in. Some of the teenagers look, reasonably, a little confused, like didn't the cop just say the exact opposite? But they all turn and slowly move toward the door, where the principal and superintendent are standing with masks on. And the kids are just trapped there in a big clump.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I remember watching this and thinking, what is it like to be those high schoolers, stuck in between your principal and your parent, between two authorities who are each so certain they have the moral high ground when it comes to your life?

Chana Joffe-Walt

Then a passage opens. The administrator stepped to the side, and the kids rush in.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The kids are inside. Soon after I saw the masks video, I saw another from Texas. A mom at a school board meeting opposing critical race theory and masks was disrupting the meeting. An officer goes over to ask her to leave, and then he starts going back and forth with her over her seated teenage son. He was just looking at his lap the whole time. Again, what's it like to be in the middle like that?

I've since seen so many school board meetings where kids sit in the audience as parents yell about school closures or Don't Say Gay laws or admissions policies. When school districts started banning books from their libraries, I kept wondering, do students care about that? Doesn't that make the books much more appealing? Or is there a kid out there who's like, I read that book. Why that one? It's not even that interesting.

This dynamic, adults arguing about the kids right in front of them, it's like a play that's quietly touring the country right, now being reenacted in different places, in different forms, a play in which you never hear from the main characters, people like the kids at the school in the masks video.

Chana Joffe-Walt

This is a student I'm going to call John. John, like every kid I talked to involved in this particular day at this particular school, asked that I change his name, and I have. The video became very divisive.

John says, what you miss, what you don't get from just hearing from the adults in that video is that the biggest thing happening for him right at that moment, and many students, was not masks. It was that this was the beginning of school. Finally, a normal year after such a long pandemic.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And people have angry parents now, coming with them to school. And there's an officer outside the front door. John was wearing a mask that day, so he was allowed in the school building. He'd walked in about 10 minutes before the confrontation outside, headed to AP English, sat down. John's class started, and then those kids from outside were allowed into the building.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And it changed the way John saw his teacher. She had such little authority in that moment and so many of the other moments that followed in the coming months. She'd ask kids to wear their mask properly. They wouldn't. She struggled visibly, saying things like, I need to find a job somewhere else. John, though, kept trying to restore the original order of things, the way he remembered school to be, the teacher in charge.

Chana Joffe-Walt

These are two students I'm going to call Daniel and Maddie, who only wanted to speak with me together, who were high school seniors who didn't want to use their real names, and who tag team every time they speak. Maddie was wearing a mask. She says she wore one because her mom wanted her to, so she was let into the school building. Daniel was not wearing a mask. He and his parents didn't agree with the mask mandate, so he was crowded in with everyone at the front door.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I asked Daniel, what happened once they were let into the building? He says they put all the kids without masks in the library, and they were there for hours, just as a sort of holding area, I guess, until they figured out what to do with them.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Everyone I spoke with agreed on this. The school year was ruined by what happened that day. Everything after that was tense. People lost trust in each other. Everyone felt less safe, less comfortable. This thing that had not been front and center for most of them became the main event. The students disagreed on which adults were to blame. Some of them blamed the parents, some blamed the teachers, but they all agreed that the adults were to blame.

So many of the big, contentious political issues right now center around kids. Should teachers be allowed to teach about racism, history, sexuality? Will stricter gun laws keep our kids safe in school? Would more aggressive climate policies keep them safer in the future? Which ones? All these policy debates that we've been having for months, that are so central to American politics right now, affect kids more than anyone else.

So today's show, from WBEZ Chicago, we talked to kids, living their kid lives in the middle of these divides. Stay with us.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Act 1, This Is Not a Drill. Even though kids are somewhat, obviously, at the center of this next one, I was initially drawn in by the parents, I suppose because this is a particular parental experience that I spend a fair amount of time trying to imagine and trying not to imagine. Dan Kois was in the middle of his workday and he got a text from his 14-year-old daughter.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Dan was half a mile from the school. He ran to his bike and immediately pedaled in the direction of his kid's high school.

Chana Joffe-Walt

This was last February, in suburban Virginia, but this kind of thing happens all over. Just a few weeks ago, in San Antonio, Texas.

Chana Joffe-Walt

For Audrey Cardenas, she didn't get a text from her kid. It was a post on Nextdoor, a neighborhood site-- "Shooting at Jefferson High School."

Chana Joffe-Walt

After Uvalde and after every school shooting that happened before Uvalde and the 40 school shootings that have happened so far just this year, a political debate emerged and re-emerges. We have too many guns. We have too few permits, too much mental illness. The teachers should have guns. The issue is really assault weapons. No, it's background checks. It's the Second Amendment.

And meanwhile, kids keep going to school, and guns keep coming to school, and parents keep standing around outside, grimly trying to imagine what is going on in those buildings during lockdowns. That's what Dan did, standing outside his kid's school.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I wanted to know that too. What's it like for the kids who are actually at the center of this thing we seem to have decided is a permanent part of our lives now?

Chana Joffe-Walt

Dan's oldest kid, Lyra, missed the loudspeaker announcement about a school lockdown, so she was very breezy about what she assumed was a drill until her sister Harper texted her, no, this is not a drill. Are you OK? The teacher shut off the lights in Lyra's English classroom, locked the door. Everyone crouched on the far wall under some shelves.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Lyra's little sister, Harper, was one floor down in health class, ninth grade. Harper's classmates were clustering along the far wall, but Harper sat in her desk, twisted her body around toward the classroom door, and started filming the door. The camera just watches the closed classroom door. Sometimes her hand shifts or shakes down to her shoes, black Converse, past the health and wellness textbooks, and then back to the door, just waiting.

Chana Joffe-Walt

A rumor started going around about a kid with a gun somewhere in the school. Harper and Lyra kept waiting for a long time. No shooter, no announcement, no information.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Dan, their dad, was still outside with all the other parents, waiting.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Dan says the weirdest part of this portion of the day was running the two stories in his head, same as Lyra. One story, this is nothing. We're just waiting. The kids will be out soon. And the other story, we're going to look back on this moment when we thought it was nothing, the one right before all the tragedy. But the longer this went on, the first story, this is nothing, had a stronger pull.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I cannot think of a more perfect illustration of what it is like to pretend things are normal in America right now, a more 2022 image than a work-from-home finance guy taking a Zoom call from his car, outside what may or may not be a school shooting in his kid's high school. The incredible peaks of disassociation, the alienation required to proceed with our daily routines while still allowing for the possibility of story number two, of tragedy at any moment. And then something happened.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Upstairs, Lyra heard the announcement too. And for her, this is when she snapped into story number two. She could feel the other kids in the room do the same thing, tensing up, getting ready for something, to do something.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Really? I do not have contact with every single American high schooler, nor does Lyra, but once she said this, I was curious, and I started asking around. And every kid I talked to, kids in Texas, New Mexico, Missouri, Minnesota, Michigan.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Nick is in East Lansing. He's a senior this year, which means he's had more than a decade to watch videos from school shootings, including videos from last year in Oxford, Michigan, which is just a little over an hour away from him and where he heard a student ran at the shooter. Nick says he's imagined being that guy in his school shooting, or he'd help other kids escape.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Nick was the first of many kids I talked to with an alarming command of the various means of egress in their school buildings. It was that way with Michael too, outside Detroit.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Michael told me, above the exit door is a dropdown ceiling with a missing tile. You could get up there. He heard a couple of years ago the seniors stuck a Christmas tree up there, so he's pretty sure there's space. You could stack the cubbies, get up to the ceiling--

Chana Joffe-Walt

And then last winter, a student threatened to kill his classmates during sixth period. Nobody knew if he really meant it, so Michael's school went into lockdown, and he ended up in the drumline room, exactly where he'd planned to be. Their band teacher told them to close the door and stay in there. So Michael and about 10 other kids sat on the floor. It was completely dark, soundproof. Everyone was whispering. Michael had thought about this moment so much and now, here it was.

Chana Joffe-Walt

That is not how Michael imagined this moment going. Michael, turns out, was not the only one with a plan. He was in a room full of kids who had all prepared for this moment, a room full of band kids who knew each other very well.

Michael says everyone was exactly themselves. Alex made jokes. Connor reminded everyone to be calm and reasonable. Lucy agreed with Connor and said, we should hear every side. And the naysayer, who I will not name, who thought everyone's idea was dumb but offered none of his own ideas, nobody was surprised. They kept going. It was constant. We should make a wall of cubbies. No, no, no. We should hide inside the drums. This went on for--

Chana Joffe-Walt

Of course. When things got a little tense in this impromptu, Lord of the Flies school shootings planning committee, Alex started playing Pumped Up Kicks at the lowest volume possible.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Michael told me Alex had played Pumped Up Kicks at other lockdowns too. It's kind of his lockdown thing, but usually he waits till the end. He says that's how you know it's over. You hear that song playing as the police escort you out the building.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Most kids will not experience actual school shootings, but every year, millions of kids will experience something like this-- school lockdowns that are not a drill, that are a sudden, urgent response to a real or perceived threat, lockdowns that can go on for hours, where teachers lock the doors, police are swarming, and helicopters bring in blood, just in case.

Kids react. Some kids cry. Some kids make out. A fourth grader named Jude told me he filled his backpack with books and held it to his chest. So many of the things I heard about kids doing were somehow generic and deeply individual. A 12-year-old in Birmingham wrote a will that said, quote, "Mom, I want to give my friend Javon everything I own. And that includes the Xbox and games and controllers."

I heard about a kid in upstate New York who called his parents from the bathroom during a lockdown and came out to them. He didn't want them to learn he was gay later in the news if he died.

But the unifying foundation across all these experiences was the feeling of flip flopping between two different stories. Maybe it's nothing, but maybe it's not. And how quickly the certainty that you are in the "probably nothing" story can crumble with one noise, with a text. For Harper and Lyra in Virginia, it was that announcement an hour into their lockdown, the deep man voice on the loudspeaker saying, today is February 10, 2022.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Which story are we in, and how does this story end? Harper and Lyra stayed in lockdown for around three hours. The normal end of school, 3:00 PM, came and went. Lyra's rehearsal for Annie never started.

Eventually, police came into the classroom with guns, helmets, and tactical gear, told everyone to put their hands up, and they walked in a line out of the building. Later, parents suspected that the loudspeaker announcement was actually the police. A caller had said he was in the school bathroom with two hostages and a gun. The police thought the shooter was out of state, and parents heard that that announcement was a test to see if he was in the building. Would police hear the PA system announcement if they got the shooter on the phone?

They didn't. There were no hostages. There was no shooter, not for Lyra and Harper's school, not for the lockdown in San Antonio, where Audrey, the mom, had her son's picture ready to show to the police. There was just the much more commonplace experience of a school lockdown that had a supposedly happy ending.

There are the established, respected rituals of an American high school experience-- prom, graduation, homecoming-- all those times where people come together and share some sort of collective experience. A school lockdown is like that, another kind of school ritual. Like prom, it comes with its own traditions and expectations.

You've imagined what it will be like ahead of time, who you might be. And later, you will look back and say, remember when that thing happened? You'll look back and say, of course that person did that.

A high schooler named Jada in New Jersey told me that years ago, back in first grade, they all hid in the closet for a lockdown and one kid fell asleep. People laughed about that for years. Another time, her freshman year, she wound up hiding in the closet again. That was her longest lockdown, and a student kept asking to go to the bathroom. The teacher kept saying no.

Chana Joffe-Walt

It was a not-good moment that later, after the lockdown, not a single person mentioned again. He never became the kid who peed in the lockdown. Jada says with that one, everyone just had a "what happens in the lockdown stays in the lockdown" attitude about the whole thing. She just thinks they all knew it could have been them.

Coming up, a middle schooler and a new law grow up side by side. What happens when they finally meet? That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Chana Joffe-Walt

It's This American Life. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt sitting in for Ira Glass. Today's show, kids are at the center of so many political debates these days, like the debate that follows every school shooting about guns and hovers above the lives of actual kids, circling, but never touching down, never really making much of an impact. In our next story, another adult debate that is super heated right now lands directly in the life of one kid our producer, Alix Spiegel, has been spending time with, a kid named Finn in Alabama.

Alabama recently passed two laws that focus on the lives of trans kids. It's one of many states to do so. There's been a massive increase in these kinds of bills across the country. Republican state legislators have proposed 69 new bills to restrict gender affirming treatment, 14 new bathroom bills, 50 school restrictions, so-called Don't Say Gay bills, and 130 sports bans.

Meanwhile, Finn has been growing up. And what's so special about this next story is that you can see how these bills develop alongside his life as he goes from eighth grade to high school and what happens when they enter the picture. Act Two, Finn Raises His Hand. Here's Alix.

Alix Spiegel

A year before the laws found their way into Finn's life, he was in eighth grade. And like most eighth graders, he wasn't carefully tracking bills in the Alabama state legislature. His attention was on other things. There were funny YouTube videos to watch and unfortunate amounts of math homework to do and the problem of which color to dye his hair, green or purple or blue.

Finn's one of those kids who likes to learn without liking school, so he's taught himself all kinds of things-- to draw and paint, to play guitar. He even fished his father's abandoned electric piano out of the corner of the music room and somehow taught himself to play.

Alix Spiegel

Finn lives in Grove Hill, Alabama, a small town roughly two hours southwest of Montgomery. In his small house, there are many heartbeats. There's his mother, Jody, and his father, Josh, his two sisters, Allison and Layla, and a Noah's Ark of animals.

Alix Spiegel

There's a duck in the backyard that gives off intense anger vibes and a whole bunch of chickens Finn decided to raise because Finn loves animals.

When Finn was little, he says he liked Grove Hill a lot. It felt green and free, but as he got older, things got more complicated. Grove Hill is a conservative Christian community, a church-three-times-a-week kind of place, as his mom likes to say. So Finn felt extremely anxious when he first decided to come out as trans in eighth grade. This was in the spring of 2021, after he and his classmates returned from COVID to in-person learning.

Alix Spiegel

Awkward for a million reasons, because the people in eighth grade had known him as a girl for as long as they had known him, because it's always hard to tell people that you see every day something that you're not sure they want to hear. And then, of course, Finn was 14. And pretty much every conversation you have when you're 14 is awkward, but Finn, this naturally shy kid, whose main social goal is to stay under the radar, forced himself. On the very first day of in-person learning, he says he lingered by his teacher's desk after class.

Alix Spiegel

At this point-- again, this is the spring of Finn's eighth grade year-- trans kids were not yet constantly in the headlines, and Finn says most of his teachers were open and sweet with him.

Alix Spiegel

Pronouns are not a small thing for Finn. When people refer to him with the wrong pronoun, he says it's so distressing, he often feels physically ill. It's a response that's not uncommon.

Alix Spiegel

But queasiness wasn't much of a problem in middle school. Finn remembers telling his friends for the first time that he wanted to go by "he."

Alix Spiegel

And that's the way it went for the rest of the year. The teachers were open. The kids were on board. And in May, Finn graduated from middle school feeling good, comfortable. Finn's parents, Josh and Jody, were incredibly relieved. They've lived in Grove Hill for most of their lives, and so have a nuanced view of the community, all the contradictions that Grove Hill, Alabama contains.

Jody told me that though many of their friends seemed completely indifferent to whether Finn was trans or not and loved him no matter what, maybe even more people in the community find the experience of her child difficult to understand, and even his existence unsettling-- which brings me to high school. This is Finn's mom, Jody.

Alix Spiegel

Now, there were no laws dictating where Finn could go to the bathroom, not yet anyway. So when Jody talked with the school principal about what Finn should do, the principal quickly came up with a solution. Finn could use the single-stall bathroom in the teacher's lounge. This suited him fine. And Finn says at the beginning of school, he was feeling relatively optimistic.

Alix Spiegel

But almost immediately, Finn encountered pushback. It started in geometry class.

Alix Spiegel

And it wasn't just the geometry teacher. There was pushback from Finn's English teacher, his science teacher, even his history and hobbies teacher.

Alix Spiegel

It's impossible to know the exact why behind this resistance. I reached out to Finn's teachers, the school principal, the superintendent's office. All either declined to talk to me or didn't respond, but it's clear that the national conversation was changing and growing.

There were more and more bills directed at trans kids, regulating how they played sports, where they went to the bathroom, what kind of medical care they could get access to, sometimes forbidding any discussion of trans issues in school at all. Did that influence this response? Was it simply teacher luck of the draw? All Finn knew was that very, very unfortunately, the feelings of the teachers seemed to be spreading.

Alix Spiegel

It was around December of his freshman year that Finn began to think more seriously about medical transition, finding a doctor who could provide hormone blockers and, eventually, testosterone. Finn thought it might help people to see him the right way.

Alix Spiegel

When Finn talked to Jody about getting treatment, hormone blockers and testosterone, she told him she was open to the idea, but needed to make sure it was safe first. She said she'd research it. So Finn plowed forward, played in band, suffered through geometry, and also became increasingly distressed, worried that his teachers would continue to misgender him, that the kids at school would continue to question whether he was truly a boy, that it would all just keep on getting worse. And then one day in geometry, Finn hit a breaking point.

Alix Spiegel

Finn says he wasn't really going to commit suicide if the teacher didn't use the right pronouns. He just couldn't think of another way to communicate his distress. The problem of suicide is incredibly serious among trans kids. A recent study showed that in 2020, roughly one in two trans youth seriously consider suicide, though when parents and schools are accepting, the rate of actual suicide attempts falls dramatically.

Finn's mom, Jody, did talk to the teacher about this note. And she says that she walked away from the conversation feeling at least a little bit better. She told me she could see the teacher cared for Finn, but felt like using his right name and pronouns was against her religion.

Alix Spiegel

So that was Finn before the bills passed-- fragile, struggling to settle into high school and get through his day. And then the lawmakers in Montgomery stepped into Finn's life.

Alix Spiegel

This is Alabama State Representative Wes Allen, one of the Republicans who sponsored the bills, talking to reporters in the press room of the state capitol on April 7 of this year, immediately after the bills passed. The first bill, HB 322, was a bathroom bill. And for Finn, would mean he'd have to use the girls restroom, not his single stall in the teacher's lounge.

The second bill, SB 184, made it a felony to provide any minor in the state with gender-affirming medical care, meaning Finn wouldn't have access to the hormones that could help him with his voice.

Alix Spiegel

As Representative Allen explains, he and his colleagues believe that teenagers are too young for this kind of treatment.

Alix Spiegel

To be clear, the American Medical Association, the American Association of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, a whole bunch of groups all say kids should have access to gender-affirming medical care and oppose legislation like this.

I went to visit Finn and Jody in May, shortly after the bills passed, but before Jody had a chance to sit down and tell Finn about them. She told me she held off when she first heard, because the fate of the medical bill was immediately thrown into question by a court challenge, and she didn't want to disturb Finn unless it turned out to be absolutely necessary.

But then, the first night I was there, Finn, Jody, and I were sitting around, talking, and the subject of the legislation came up. And suddenly, we found ourselves inside the conversation that Jody had been delaying, the conversation where she explained to Finn that a bathroom bill had passed and would become official law over the summer break, so when Finn started 10th grade in the fall, he might be forced to use the girls bathroom.

Alix Spiegel

As soon as Finn heard about the bathroom bill, his face drained of color, and you could see tears in his eyes.

Alix Spiegel

Jody told Finn she knew this was not the news that he wanted to hear, but she felt like he needed to understand now that there could be a different arrangement in the fall. She said she had talked to the school principal, who in the past had been incredibly helpful and kind to Jody and Finn.

Alix Spiegel

Jody started talking through some of the regrouping options, but Finn just sat silent, saying nothing. Then one of the many animals who live in the house appeared in the doorway. It was Finn's personal cat, Simon.

Alix Spiegel

A couple of weeks after this conversation, school let out, and I didn't see or talk to Finn and Jody until August, right before the start of the school year. Jody told me that Finn had had a good summer. He's in his first long-term relationship with a 16-year-old who lives one town over. They spent a lot of time together. They watched YouTube, went roller skating, and of course, spent countless hours playfully insulting each other in that way that teenagers always do.

Also, over the summer, the bathroom bill that so distressed Finn quietly became law. Jody told me that a couple of days before my visit, she'd reached out to the school principal to see if they'd keep Finn's accommodation and was eventually told that Finn would have access to the bathroom, but only Finn, and only as long as no other kid in school came out or complained in any way. For whatever reason, Finn had been grandfathered in, but the door was closed behind him.

Jody said Finn was deeply discouraged by the arrangement, and that after he'd found out, he'd taken a nosedive in terms of mood. He was sure the bathroom would be taken away and that people would be even worse about using the right pronouns. Jody said he started talking almost relentlessly about dropping out. It wasn't just the law, she said, but after the difficulty of the previous year, this extra piece of weight felt to him like it, quote, "sealed his fate."

It's true that the Finn I found when I returned to Grove Hill felt like a different kid. He seemed much smaller than before, emotionally, even physically. And you could tell from the way that he was talking that he was in that kind of pain that bubbles out into the open, even when you don't want it to.

For example, towards the start of our conversation, I asked what I thought would be a fun warm-up question. I'd been privately wondering, how would I begin this story? What was the right way to introduce this kid to people like you? So I asked Finn to decide for himself.

Alix Spiegel

We talked about the bathroom work-around, how precarious it was.

Alix Spiegel

Finn's solution if the bathroom got taken away is what a lot of people do in this situation.

Alix Spiegel

In the weeks before this story was scheduled to air, I called around to some of the lawyers and caregivers in Alabama who monitor trans kids to find out what they were seeing. And the reports I got back were pretty grim.

One lawyer told me that she was getting reports that even the kids who always loved school were suddenly resistant to going, and there were serious concerns that there would be increased incidence of self harm. In a way, despite how difficult this has been for him, Finn is kind of a best-case scenario. He has parents who unconditionally support him.

[PHONE RINGS]

Alix Spiegel

A few days ago, I spoke with Finn for the first time since I visited in August and found out that he was doing surprisingly well.

Alix Spiegel

Finn said all his teachers were being respectful about pronouns and name stuff this year, and though there had been a couple of incidents, including a pretty serious fistfight, he was holding on for sure. No one had come forward to complain about the bathroom, and no other kids had come out, so Finn found himself preoccupied with less existential problems.

Alix Spiegel

Finn told me he doesn't think about the laws every day, but when he does, they make him mad.

Alix Spiegel

Finn and his family are doing what they can to adapt, and they did have a small victory recently because of a different law, one that's been on the books forever. It lets anyone change their name to whatever they want. Finn and Jody got the paperwork done over the summer. And a few weeks ago, a new social security card arrived in the mail.

In the eyes of the law, "Finn" is now Finn's official name. No teacher or legislator can say anything different. Still, the laws passed earlier this year hover in the air as Finn goes about his day. From his perspective, they don't protect him. They just create obstacles. They've made the job of being Finn more difficult.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Alix Spiegel is one of the producers of our show.

Chana Joffe-Walt

One more thing before we close this cereal bar down. I saw an article recently, as I was working on this episode, from NBC News. And it weirdly connects the two stories in today's show in a way I did not see coming. It's an investigation into a popular conspiracy theory. Maybe you've heard it. It is that schools all across the country are offering litter boxes to kids who identify as cats.

If you hadn't heard this one, sorry. This is all over social media. The story is kids are telling their schools they're cats, and schools are accommodating them by providing litter boxes.

At least 20 Republican politicians have repeated that this is happening, that this is, quote, "a growing crisis," that schools are just allowing kids to identify as whatever they want. This gender identity stuff has gone too far, and there are kids who are only communicating in, quote, "barks and hisses," and it's gotten so extreme that schoolchildren are now using litter boxes. So that's the rumor.

NBC News looked into this. They investigated each one of these claims and tried to find schools where this is actually happening. They reached out to every school rumored to have a litter box-- over 20 places-- and they found one, a whole school district in Colorado. They had kitty litter, but they were not keeping it because kids were identifying as animals. No kids were identifying as animals.

The district, Jefferson County School District, is home to Columbine High School. Schools in the Jefferson district have cat litter in case they have to go into lockdown during a school shooting. The litter is part of their overall plan if there is an active shooter situation. They have litter and buckets so kids have somewhere to pee, somewhere that's not in a bottle, in a closet.

They've kept cat litter on hand for years, along with candy for diabetic students, a map of the school, flashlights, wet wipes, and first aid items. The litter boxes are about school shootings.

I don't know. I just keep thinking about the hours we've spent talking about kitty litter and the money that went into making this non-issue a series of talking points on top of other non-issues that also became talking points about where kids pee in school, when in America, we don't have a problem of kids saying they're cats and being provided with litter boxes. What we have are adults who have accepted that school shootings will continue to happen, and they're preparing. What we have, which kids will tell you, is an actual problem, actual threats, actual fear, actual trauma, actual deaths.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Our program was produced today by Nadia Reiman and edited by Laura Starecheski. Valerie Kipnis produced the prologue of the episode. The people who put together today's show include Chris Benderev, Sean Cole, Michal Comite, Aviva DeKornfeld, Cassie Howley, Tobin Lowe, Miki Meek, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Ryan Rummery, Alissa Shipp, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman, senior editor, David Kestenbaum, and our executive editor, Emaneule Berry. Special thanks today to Rachel Lissy, Sidney Duncan, Dylan Nettles, Rose Saxe at the ACLU for helping us count laws, and all the parents who gave us permission to talk to their children.

This story about lockdowns was inspired by the Slate podcast Mom and Dad are Fighting, where I first heard Dan Kois share his experience. Original music in Act 2 by Christina Courtin and Michael Lavelle. Editorial support for that story from Tuck Woodstock.

Our website, ThisAmericanLife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 750 episodes for absolutely free. There's videos and lists of favorite shows and tons of other stuff there. Again, ThisAmericanLife.org, This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to my boss, Ira Glass. He's out this week, but he called just to remind everyone that dressing up for Halloween is optional at our office.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I'm Chana Joffe-Walt. We'll be back next week with more stories of This American Life.