Policymakers often focus school safety discussions on physical security and making schools into hardened targets, but community members (especially students) said these measures make students feel less safe…
— from the Colorado Education Association press release, “Positive School Environment Cited as Main Factor in School Safety”, August 22, 2019
The quote above, from a recent press release sent by the Colorado Education Association (CEA), touches on a prominent aspect of 21st century public education.
School Security, and School Safety.
These are two related phrases that, for most of us nowadays, likely bring to mind remotely controlled locked doors, bullet-proof glass, ID tags, metal detectors, armed policemen patrolling school hallways.
The 6-page CEA report mentioned in the press release is titled, “School Climate and School Safety: A Community Perspective” (and you can download it here.)
If we think about those mental images — armed guards, bullet-proof glass, metal detectors, locked doors — we quickly realize these features have long played a prominent role in prison security. It’s only recently that many people started to believe these features belonged in public schools.
When I attended elementary school in California in the 1960s, I walked about eight city blocks to my school — Grover Cleveland Elementary — sometimes by myself, sometimes with my older sister, and occasionally I would meet up with school friends also walking to school through the quiet neighborhood without adult supervision. I can say that I basically felt safe and secure doing so.
At school, I also felt safe and secure. At the crosswalks leading to the school ground, volunteer sixth graders dressed in uniform and holding large “STOP” signs escorted us across the street. During the school day, students and parents and community members had access to the entire school facility, and the only physical violence we experienced was the occasional fist fight between a couple of the ‘bad boys’ or ‘bad girls’ out on the school playground during recess.
We also heard rumors of bad students getting spanked by the School Principal, which was certainly a form of violence, albeit politically acceptable violence. It was referred to as ‘discipline.’ No one questioned its place in the school environment.
Times have changed. But violence still comes in many forms. Physical violence. Emotional violence. Political violence. Violence parading as ‘security.’
From “School Climate and School Safety: A Community Perspective”:
On August 17, 2019 Padres & Jóvenes Unidos (Padres) and the Colorado Education Association (CEA) hosted a community focus group to discuss how school climate impacts school safety in Colorado. Community members, students, and educators gathered at a union hall in Jefferson County to share stories and discuss solutions.
The vision and ideas discussed at this focus group mirror the research consensus: schools that are integrated into the community and have adequate counseling and mental health resources will improve school climate, decreasing incidents of school-based violence. Creating a welcoming school environment, not target hardening, was the clear message of the focus group.
Padres & Jóvenes Unidos (“Parents & Students United”) got its start in 1992, when parents at Valverde Elementary School organized to remove the principal there, who was punishing Spanish-speaking students by forcing them to eat their lunches on the cafeteria floor. After that victory, the parents decide to continue organizing and recruiting parents, and Padres Unidos was officially founded. The organization gradually spread across the Denver metropolitan area, focusing on issues such as substandard education, nutrition, inequality, treatment of immigrants, and the “school to prison pipeline” that particularly affects students of color in the Denver area.
As the organization expanded, it began welcoming students as well, and the name was changed to Padres & Jóvenes Unidos.
By 2012, certain significant changes to Denver Public Schools discipline policies had been won by activist community groups including Padres & Jóvenes Unidos, and that same year marked the passage of SB 46 (HB 1345), dubbed the Smart School Discipline Law (SSDL). The SSDL provides:
- Legislative acknowledgment of the harmful consequences of ‘zero-tolerance policies’ in schools and that contact with the juvenile justice system should be avoided.
- Obligation for school districts to implement “proportionate” discipline (graduated consequences) to reduce suspensions, expulsions and referrals to law enforcement.
- Requirement of schools to implement prevention strategies, restorative justice, peer mediation, counseling, and other approaches to minimize student exposure to juvenile and criminal justice systems.
- Prioritization of appropriate training of school-based police officers on appropriate discipline with students of color, LGBT students and students with disabilities.
From the ‘Padres’ website:
This groundbreaking victory brought the progress made at the local level, with Denver Public Schools, to all 178 school districts across the state. To date, we have seen undeniable progress and promising developments since the passage of SSDL, but we still have work to do in pushing alternative forms of discipline.
‘Security.’ ‘Safety.’ These words have expansive meanings. Physical. Emotional. Political.
When a student enters a school building through a remotely-controlled locked door, and has their back pack searched by an armed police officer, does this promote a sense of security and safety? Isn’t there a lot more to the idea of ‘security’ than issuing guns to school teachers?
Last November, the Archuleta School District (ASD) asked the community’s taxpayers to approve an additional $1.7 million in annual property taxes to allow the District to pay higher teacher and staff salaries, to hire police officers in each of the District’s three school buildings, and to fund full-day kindergarten. The turn-over rate in the Pagosa schools, in recent years, has been similar to the statewide rate; we are not sure whether more money in salaries will change that rate, but the taxpayers were willing to test that theory for seven years of higher taxes.
Meanwhile, the number of Colorado college students choosing to major in education has been steadily declining. As our schools become hardened targets with locked doors and armed guards, the high school students graduating from those same schools are becoming less and less interested in working in those institutions.
Will putting armed police in our school buildings actually help to keep violence out of the schools — or will it, in fact, insert a culture of violence into the environment? Does it, in fact, subtly and unintentionally teach children that, in America, ‘guns are the solution’?
The Jefferson County study group described in the “School Climate and School Safety: A Community Perspective” report was asked to weigh in on solutions for improving security and safety in our schools. When the votes were tallied, the participating teachers, students, parents, and community members came to the following conclusions:
The most popular ways to increase safety and security in our public schools, the study group concluded, were absolutely not to harden the target.
Quite the opposite.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.