Internal Lockdown

Over a morning, you can tend to your garden, paint a room, watch the morning news repeat its talking points. Over a morning, you can do the laundry or visit the doctor for a check-up; you can run errands. Over a morning, you can stop a school in its track, or lockdown an AP English class. Over a morning, you can get revenge. Green Hill is a small, ordinary Pennsylvania town where nothing ever happens until the morning its normalcy is crushed by a shocking act of violence. One morning the school is interrupted by the frantic announcement calling for a lockdown. AP English teacher, Mike Zarlapski, swings into action, following the lockdown procedures. Although his students help pile as many desks in front of the classroom door as possible, their panic is not allayed as they communicate with what is now the outside world first-in responders, police entering the building, and the shooters who remain at large via cellphone. Internal Lockdown, Ernie Quatrani's, first novel is raw, honest, and his most important novel. Although it's his first, the book is told in a straightforward style from different viewpoints, but mostly through the lens of the kids locked in the classroom. Before there was Columbine, a student Mr. Quatrani taught murdered a classmate in a biology lab. The student walked out of the high school after deciding against shooting up the cafeteria. Mr. Quatrani was in the cafeteria proctoring a study hall. As a high school teacher, he functioned in a world where lockdown drills became routine, but there was much more to a lockdown than can be imagined, as Internal Lockdown reveals. The novel is based on his unfortunate experience and years of research.

Ernie Quatrani was a public high teacher and baseball coach for over three decades, heavily involved in co-curricular and faculty activities, including a school safety committee. He still is resident of the semi-rural district he taught in. He has been a part-time newspaper reporter for local papers since he was in high school.

Fifteen years into his career as a teacher, six years before Columbine, a fatal shooting occurred within the school building Ernie taught in. A student took the life of a classmate with two gunshots in a biology classroom. At the time, no plan was in place to react to the shooting in real time. Ernie was concerned about school safety long before Columbine brought national attention to a growing problem. The concerns were also personal because his three children were progressing through the high school from 1998 to 2006.

Internal Lockdown began as a short story in 2004, a way for the author to deal with what he saw as large gaps in preparedness: the point of view of teachers and students sheltering in a building, and the unanticipated ramifications of the ordeal. Those concerns only grew for the author as lockdown practices became less of a priority and too routine. Actual lockdowns at the school were not debriefed in any depth in order to improve the system. Quatrani s has had memoir writings published in Apalachee Review, North Dakota Quarterly, r.kv.r.y., and Green Hill Literary Lantern.