This mom is demanding action

Story by Tara Ryazansky

Photos by Emily Jabbour

It was when Emily Jabbour was forced into playing the quiet game that she realized it was time for her to speak up.

“My daughters both go to Brandt. It’s an elementary school on 9th Street,” Jabbour says. It was 2016. Jabbour was visiting the school as a parent volunteer. It was years before she took on her current role as president of the Hoboken City Council. “I happened to be in to help out with a class project, and I wasn’t with my daughter. I was with another class at the time when an active shooter drill happened.”

Jabbour was in a pre-k classroom when the drill started.

“It didn’t occur to me that the active shooter drills started at that age. I ended up doing a shelter-in-place exercise with this classroom of little kiddos. They were so little that the teacher kept saying, ‘It’s the quiet game. We play the quiet game.’ We all kind of huddled in the corner together, and the principal had to rattle on the doorknob to stage it as though someone was trying to get into the classroom, and then everybody had to be extra quiet. They framed it as a game. That was the thing that absolutely broke me.”

It wasn’t the first time that Jabbour had considered standing up against gun violence.

“When I was a senior in high school, Columbine happened. I have this very vivid see page 8