A rash of school shootings by students in the past year has forced educators nationwide to take a new look at school safety.
More school administrators, parents and students have realized that “schools aren’t islands,” says Ron Stephens. He’s the director of the National School Safety Center, a group that promotes school safety.
“Schools reflect what’s going on in the community,” Stephens says. “To put together an effective safety plan, you have to look at the community.”
So what steps have been taken to make this school year safe? For one, Stephens says, more administrators are extending rules regulating violence to include students’ actions that occur off school premises.
Take Paul Vallas, chief of the Chicago Public Schools. Because each of the 25 Chicago school kids who died violently during the past school year died off school grounds, Vallas has extended the school system’s zero-tolerance policy of student violence to include the community.
What that means is that any student who commits a violent act faces expulsion or transfer to a school for juvenile delinquents – regardless of where the incident occurs.
“We believe our responsibility extends beyond the schoolhouse doors,” he says. “We want (students) to be safe playing or running in the park or going to a movie.”
Vallas also has hired nearly 100 violence-intervention specialists to go into communities and work with students, police and parents to identify potentially violent kids.
Other school districts are doing what the Chicago Public Schools has done and are hiring counselors. “Preventing a tragedy in the first place is becoming more important,” Stephens says.
But Stephens cautions that many school officials still believe that the dangers students face come mainly from outside schools – or, at least, outside their schools. What happened in other schools, they say, can’t happen to them.
And, statistically, they have a point. A recent report from the National School Safety Center (NSSC), a group that monitors school safety, found that school deaths account for less than 1 percent of the homicides and suicides among school-aged kids.
But although school violence has decreased overall in recent years, multiple killings have increased. And they can occur anywhere, according to the NSSC report. “Extensive evidence exists that violence can invade schools in rural areas, in the suburbs and in vast urban centers,” the authors write. They say a violent culture and kids’ access to guns are partly to blame.
Many school officials have poured money into security measures such as metal detectors, guards and surveillance cameras in hopes of averting a Jonesboro-type tragedy, Stephens says.
But although these measures may help keep weapons out of schools, they won’t stop the kid who is truly determined to hurt classmates. The two boys convicted in the Jonesboro killings used a fire alarm to lure classmates outside the school before shooting and killing four of them.
“Security measures don’t address the root of the problem because you can’t put a metal detector at the gate to a community,” Stephens says.
“People who believe random violence happens to other people don’t deal with the issues – poverty, domestic abuse, etc. – that can lead to violence anywhere.”
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