We’re going to talk about school safety, and what that truly means.
Today, November 6, 2018, is the final day for submitting your ballot — your lengthy ballot — in the Colorado general election. You may have mailed your ballot weeks ago, but a lot of voters seem to have waited until the last minute to vote. (It’s too late to mail your ballot, but you can drop your ballot off at the Archuleta County Courthouse up until 7:00pm this evening.)
One of the measures included on the ballot for most Archuleta County voters is labeled “5A.” It’s the last measure on the printed ballot, which does not necessarily make it the least important. As required by Colorado law, the measure is written as one long, run-on sentence — the type of sentence your high school English teacher would have marked with a red pencil:
SHALL ARCHULETA COUNTY SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 50 JT TAXES BE INCREASED $1.7 MILLION ANNUALLY FOR A LIMITED SEVEN-YEAR PERIOD (COMMENCING IN COLLECTION YEAR 2019 AND ENDING AFTER COLLECTION YEAR 2025) WHICH MONEYS SHALL BE USED TO:
- RECRUIT AND RETAIN HIGHLY QUALIFIED TEACHERS AND STAFF;
- FUND FULL TIME SCHOOL RESOURCE OFFICERS FOR SAFETY;
- FUND FULL DAY KINDERGARTEN; AND
- PROVIDE REQUIRED FUNDING FOR PAGOSA PEAK OPEN SCHOOL TO INCREASE STAFF SALARIES, SUPPLEMENT FULL DAY KINDERGARTEN, AND IMPROVE SCHOOL SAFETY
THROUGH A PROPERTY TAX OVERRIDE MILL LEVY TO BE IMPOSED AT A RATE SUFFICIENT TO PRODUCE THE AMOUNT SET FORTH ABOVE, TO BE DEPOSITED INTO THE GENERAL FUND OF THE DISTRICT, AND TO BE IN ADDITION TO THE PROPERTY TAXES THAT OTHERWISE WOULD BE LEVIED FOR THE GENERAL FUND?
In the above measure, we note the phrase: “School Resource Officers for Safety.”
A school resource officer is, presumably, a police officer trained in the art of apprehending criminals who intend harm to school children. We might presume that the officers who would be patrolling the halls of our three conventional schools — Pagosa Springs Elementary, Pagosa Springs Middle School and Pagosa Springs High School — will be wearing guns. That would be a presumption, based on fears that one of our local schools could be the site of a school shooting at some point in the future. To help hire those (armed?) officers, the School District is asking for an $11.9 million tax increase ($1.7 million each year for seven years.)
(Our local charter school, Pagosa Peak Open School, is not currently proposing to hire police officers.)
Is this the right way to spend our taxes? The answer depends on a couple of deeper questions.
1. Are our schools becoming more dangerous?
and
2. Will parents, teachers and students feel safer, with police in the hallways?
Question number 1 is pretty easy to answer. Reporter Martine Caste provided the figures in a recent article written for NPR.org:
The Parkland shooting last month has energized student activists, who are angry and frustrated over gun violence. But it’s also contributed to the impression that school shootings are a growing epidemic in America.
In truth, they’re not.
“Schools are safer today than they had been in previous decades,” says James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University who has studied the phenomenon of mass murder since the 1980s.
With the help of doctoral student Emma Fridel, Professor Fox crunched the numbers, and the results were shared on the Northeastern University website.
According to their research, the number of children killed in schools in the early 1990s was much higher than today. Not only were the number of incidents greater 25 years ago, the number of fatalities were also higher. The following graph was shared on that website:
“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” Fox explained. What has changed, however, is the way the news media and social media have treated the incidents, and the way school districts have responded.
From the 2018 Northeastern article by Allie Nicodemo and Lia Petronio:
After the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, schools across the country began holding active shooter drills in which they huddled together in a corner or hid under their desks. Such exercises — which may include someone walking around pretending to shoot students — can be very traumatic, Fridel said, and there is no evidence that they help protect students.
“These measures just serve to alarm students and make them think it’s something that’s common,” she said.
But it’s not common. It’s statistically rare. School shootings are not a growing epidemic.
Based on my recent online research, it appears that no Colorado elementary school student has been killed or injured in a school shooting since at least 1990. In fact, in the entire American West — from Colorado to California. from Montana to New Mexico, and including Alaska and Hawaii — I have been able to find only one case of an elementary school student being injured by a gun in school since 1990.
In Bremerton, WA, an 8-year-old student was injured when a fellow student dropped his backpack that contained a gun he had brought to school. The shot hit the other student in the stomach, but her injuries were not fatal.
If you want to research this subject yourself, you might find this web page on the Ballotpedia website to be helpful.
Nevertheless, school districts all across the country are asking for tax increases for “school safety.” But the precautions they take — such as installing metal detectors and requiring ID cards for entry — have proven ineffective in past school shootings.
In 2005, a 16-year-old killed seven people at his Minnesota high school by walking through the front door metal detector and fatally shooting a guard.
In a 1998 shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas, two students pulled a fire alarm and began sniping people as they filed out to the parking lot, killing five and wounding 10 others.
From the Northeastern article:
In addition to being ineffective, Fox said increased security measures of these kinds can do more harm than good. He called the suggestion to arm teachers “absurd” and “over the top.”
“I’m not a big fan of making schools look like fortresses, because they send a message to kids that the bad guy is coming for you — if we’re surrounding you with security, you must have a bull’s-eye on your back,” Fox said. “That can actually instill fear, not relieve it.”
But besides making children more fearful, there’s another good reason why we might not want police in school hallways…