How do you make sense of a lunatic breaking into a school to kill 6 and 7-year-old children? There is no sense to make. Evil doesn’t have to make sense. Its job is to create chaos. School systems all over the country are coming to the realization that no matter what they do, there is no totally safe school. Schools are not prisons and we should not make them so.
Sandy Hook was more secure than most, visitors had to be buzzed in before the doors would unlock, That didn’t stop Adam Lanza from breaking into the school to loose evil and create havoc.That unfortunate reality that schools cannot be made totally safe does not give us an excuse to throw up our hands and do nothing.
A higher degree of safety does not lie in arming teachers and making school grounds into fortresses. We expect so much from teachers already. They are instructors, social workers, doctors, nurses and a myriad of other occupations. We should not add sheriff to that list.
What school systems across the country can learn from Newtown is that staff training works. Creating a safe school environment lies in training teachers and personnel about what to do if all hell breaks loose.
Aside from training we can make our facilities safer. Doors with glass at the main entrance areas are out. Surveillance cameras on the main doors are in, as are cameras at other access points. The ability to close off individual corridors of schools, using automatic gates, is an option to minimize the mobility of an attacker. And there are metal detectors.
To retrofit schools will cost money and superintendents in every school system in the country are already pinching pennies.
So will money get in the way of school safety? Yes. Once the heaviness of this latest tragedy eases, we will go about our daily lives, thinking that something so horrendous could never happen in our communities.
Newtown, Conn., didn’t think something so vile could happen there, either.
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So you are advocating doing NOTHING to enhance the protection of students at school?
If you do not want to be armed, I'm sure there are teachers in your school who would.
If there were a program to arm teachers, I'm SURE that the procedure wouldn't be to leave the gun in their desk, like the missing cell phones you mentioned.
You want to rely only on gun control laws.
Let me ask you something.
It's already illegal to commit murder. How's that working out?
It's illegal to drive drunk. Yet thousands die every year doing just that.
Certian drugs are illegal. That does nothing to stop people from buying and using and dying from drugs.
But make guns illegal and that will work??
Your lack of ability to think rationally scares me because you are supposed to be teaching our children.
I wish I could look you face to face when I ask this next question....
Would you rather die or at least try to defend yourself?
Reading your comments, it appears you do not want to defend yourself. And you don't want others around you to be able to defend themselves either.
Tell your fellow teachers you'd rather they die than have the ability to defend themselves.
You only want government legislated protection in the form of a law that you know criminals will ignore.
Also, fortifying entrances is ridiculous. Are we suggesting the students never go outside? What about PE, recess, use of the outdoor classroom? How would a hired security person or fortified doors protect the children when the 1000 students are dismissed to buses,cars, bicycles? We need stricter gun control now. America's love affair with guns has left us all with blood on our hands.
If you isolate a crazy person to one area of the school via automatically locking gates, you condemn all in that area of the school to death by locking them in with the madman.
Have you listened to the released 911 tapes from Sandy Hook? 18 students and a teacher were found in a closet. He found them and they all died. clearly, being trained to hide didn't work.
It would have been nice if the teacher in that closet had the ability to defend herself and her kids when he opened the door.
I will never understand the why some people think it's better to be a victim than to have the tools available to them to defend themselves.