Protect Our Kids
Last Friday, I was all set to put up a blog post about preparing toddlers for kindergarten, but the events at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., made kids sounding out words seem a little less relevant. (Stay tuned, pre-K conversation will be coming up in a future post.)
For now, I want to the experts to talk about school safety. It is an essential ingredient to a workable learning environment. It doesn't take a licensed therapist to understand that kids can't learn anything when they don't feel safe. In a recent student opinion poll from My Voice, 42 percent of the respondents said there was violent crime in their community and more than half said bullying is a problem in their school.
In 2009, the Education Department and the Justice Department did a joint study on crime in schools. The study found that 75 percent of public schools recorded one or more incident of violent crime, and 25 percent reported that bullying occurred between students on a daily or weekly basis.
"Schools should be safe havens where young people can learn and prosper, and anything less than that is unacceptable," said Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder when they released it. I don't think anyone would disagree with that statement.
From bullying among classmates to deranged gunmen invading an elementary school classroom, it seems as though students are less mentally and physically safe than we all would like to believe. What must be done to bolster school safety? How can communities make sure that schools are protected beyond basic law enforcement? Are there things that federal and state governments can do? Do gun rights have any place in this conversation? How can students become engaged in discussions of their own safety?
December 21, 2012 8:50 PM
It's Not About Schools
By Kevin Welner
I’ve been checking this space all week, interested in what my colleagues would write. Nothing. But I think that silence itself is an important response. While school safety is an educational issue, the Newtown killings are not—at least not in any direct sense.
Schools can and should take steps to address issues such as bullying. The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence has described effective programs, and we at the NEPC have described the research in this area and set forth specific recommendations, particularly focused on safe schools for lgbt students. This is where school policy should indeed be front and center.
But the unimaginable horror of Newtown was not about schools. The innocent children of Sandy Hook Elementary School last week or at Columbine High School over a decade ago could just as easily been innocent theater-goers in Aurora, innocent parishioners at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, innocent college students at Vir...
I’ve been checking this space all week, interested in what my colleagues would write. Nothing. But I think that silence itself is an important response. While school safety is an educational issue, the Newtown killings are not—at least not in any direct sense.
Schools can and should take steps to address issues such as bullying. The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence has described effective programs, and we at the NEPC have described the research in this area and set forth specific recommendations, particularly focused on safe schools for lgbt students. This is where school policy should indeed be front and center.
But the unimaginable horror of Newtown was not about schools. The innocent children of Sandy Hook Elementary School last week or at Columbine High School over a decade ago could just as easily been innocent theater-goers in Aurora, innocent parishioners at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, innocent college students at Virginia Tech, innocent people meeting with a Congresswoman near a supermarket in Tucson, and on and on and on.
This also isn’t just about assault weapons or mental health services. Yes, those are the low-hanging fruit, and if we don’t act seriously on those fronts it’s a sure sign that we as a society just don’t give a damn. But we also shouldn’t dismiss those who point to violent media or bullying or other possible contributors.
I am writing this only a few hours after Wayne LaPierre of the NRA announced that organization’s response to the Newtown massacre: place an armed security guard in every US school. I dearly hope that this NRA proposal will be dismissed as destructive, absurd, and counterproductive. But even the suggestion points to our need for renewal and to how far we’ve strayed from even pursuing the sort of society envisioned by our better angels.
In the wake of the latest atrocity, some of us are angry and some are just incredibly sad. I dearly hope that this time we respond seriously, but I also hope that our responses resist tying yet another millstone around the neck of our schools.
Read More