Security Measures Awaken Fear

Danger zone A spate of school shootings across the country has prompted Inland Northwest educators to take several steps to safeguard students from violence. Our Generation contributors ponder the question: Have things gone too far?

Police officers roam the already crowded, gloomy halls, making the school seem even more like a dungeon than usual. Security cameras guard each entrance. There is talk of installing metal detectors, forcing students to wear name badges, even of closing a campus that doesn’t have space to feed every student at lunchtime.

All this because two students in Littleton, Colo., went on a killing rampage. All this to satisfy paranoid parents that their children really are safe in school.

Unfortunately, what these parents fail to realize is that all these so-called precautions designed to make students feel safe actually do anything but. In many cases, these security measures awaken students’ uneasiness and paranoia - the very things they are designed to quell.

In trying to protect us from ourselves, the schools have taken a fatal step over the line and need to be reined in before the public school system installs barracks for student quarters and requires them to be under campus supervision 24 hours a day. (This is, of course, merely following the current course of action to its logical conclusion and should not be interpreted as anything resembling a good idea.)

A case in point is an incident that occurred at Sandpoint High School during the 1998-99 school year. Two students, one a freshman, the other an eighth-grader, decided that calling in a bomb threat would be a good way to get out of school early.

Over the course of four days, three threats were called in, and school was canceled for two of them. After that, a wave of mass hysteria swept through town.

Security measures were implemented, and several students began wearing placards on their backpacks that read “Prisoner of Sandpoint High School Penitentiary, Prisoner #00001666.”

By September, many of these measures had been forgotten in all but name. Such security measures won’t work unless they actually make most students feel safer.

Already, weapons policies are making students’ lives more difficult. Students who hunt have to drop off their weapons before class or get them after school because they can’t leave them in their cars. Those ever-so-handy tools known as pocketknives also have been banned. And as if that weren’t bad enough, one school expelled a student for carrying a nail clipper with a nail file. For a nail file to be considered a weapon is quite a stretch of imagination, if not outright ludicrous.

School administrators need to spend less time worrying about protecting us and more time worrying about educational standards. Students will feel safer when they see administrators and teachers who feel safe enough to devote their time to teaching.