As a former educator, I am intimately familiar
with the challenges of providing safe, positive learning environments for young
people. Many times in my career I have
been faced with issues of school safety and discipline, either as a school
administrator or a teacher, and each of those times I learned more about
myself, about my students and about good schools.
Here is one of those times:Early one morning I was talking to a student who approached me in the hallway. She told me that on the day before, two male students were involved in a verbal altercation on the bus. “Ms. Mac, they were bucking up to fight. Rob started it cuz he said he didn’t like Scott and Scott was talking bad. Rob was like talking about his clique and Scott kept talking about he didn’t even care cuz he has his own clique.” Everything was a blur until she mentioned that she overheard Scott that day in the cafeteria talking about bringing a gun to school. I was stunned, I was angry and I was sad. Truthfully, my first reaction was to cry. It was my first year as a school administrator and I was the school disciplinarian and it was about 4 weeks into the school year. I was not prepared to hear those words neither was I prepared with an easy answer. I thanked her and she asked me not to disclose who shared the information.
I pulled together the student support team
immediately and we discussed how we would respond. We decided to talk to both students first. Both admitted to the verbal altercation and
both promised that the situation was over.
The general sense of the team was that the situation between the two was
not resolved and we began wondering aloud about the possibility of extreme violence
in the school. We debated our options
and landed on installing the unused metal detector at the front entrance. Ironically, we had discussed installing the
metal detector just a few weeks before then, before school started and decided as a group that
we didn’t want to work in a school where the community was subjected to the
harshness of that. So we locked it in a
storage room, never thinking we would ever bring it out. It was a decision that I applauded in the
summer and it was difficult to reconcile having been part of a decision to
subsequently install it. We just couldn’t
chance the safety of the other students.
None of us wanted to have a conversation with a parent, with students,
with any member of the school community about possibility or the actuality of
gun violence on campus.
The next morning came and I was nervous about the
day. I couldn’t sleep the night before
and I couldn’t eat breakfast. I arrived
to school tired and helped move the metal detector in place. When the school buses arrived, the Principal
greeted each bus and informed the students of the metal detector. I was left inside the school to watch the
procession of our students. It was
agonizing. Students wondered aloud about
why the metal detector suddenly appeared and without notice. They voiced displeasure.
That was
a difficult few days for me. As a
teacher, I never had to think about making decisions around school safety. But as a school administrator, I knew the
research about the impact of over-policing in schools; too often, these
practices have led to police involvement in a broad range of school issues and
conflicts that are not serious and do not threaten school safety resulting
in the criminalization of youth - particularly students of color, students with
disabilities, LGBTQ youth - for school behavior that can be more effectively
addressed by educators and parents. And on that day, I saw the faces of my
students who changed their opinion of who our school was and what we stood
for and who also had changed their opinions of the adults in the building. One student, Corey, eventually
voiced what I saw on students’ faces, saying, “I don’t want to go to a school
with a metal detector. This aint what I
signed up for.” I know that many of our staff felt the same.
I learned many things from that experience. First and foremost that being a school leader was going to lead to unexpected challenges where my core values would be tested. There are many competing interests that can produce tension in a school but students and their well-being are the priority. In any situation, there weren’t always going to be a “right” and a “wrong” answer. I learned something from my students: that they are the ones who create the school’s community and that they should have a voice in what the school community looks like. And in this case, because their voices were lost in the adult discussion, we had work to do to regain their trust. Lastly, I learned that sometimes kids don’t feel safe in the presence of traditional safety measures, and that sometimes they just want to be kids in a space where they don’t feel guarded or suspected all the time.
School leaders should consider what kind of
community space is created with traditional school safety measures and whether
or not students actually feel safer by their use. Ultimately, we all can have a say in creating
positive safe environments, but we have to know that whatever the decision,
there will be an impact for everybody.
*the names of students were changed
read the statement by the National Association of School Pyschologists: http://www.nasponline.org/advocacy/schoolsecurity.pdf
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