School Safety: How much is too much?

Hirschfield's article on "School Surveillance in America" was very interesting to me on a personal level, as my experiences in both Middle and High School were extremely different from the ones portrayed in the reading for tomorrow's class. At the risk of sounding ignorant, I was not aware of the extent of the safety measures taken by some public schools to ensure the safety of their students after having spent the majority of my school days in private school. Though, from what I gathered in Hirschfield's article, it seems as though such measures are a necessary evil in public schools across America given the unpredictable nature of violence in these institutions. Following the events at Columbine High School, it seems reasonable that public schools would look to increase safety measures due to external pressure from parents, etc. Yet, at the same time, "the uneven use of surveillance practices for the purposes of punishment and exclusion can reinforce racial, gender, and socioeconomic disparities in arrests and suspensions, educational attainment, and school safety" (39). It is an interesting dynamic, as it seems very unlikely that the events that took place at Columbine High School in 1999 would happen again. However, the school systems have to react to such situations both swiftly and appropriately so as to ensure the safety of their students against future acts of violence despite how unlikely they may be. The use of cameras and metal detectors in public schools may put the minds of the students' parents at ease, but how much are they actually doing to mitigate violence in the public school system? Are we not conditioning these children to believe that they are, in fact, a threat to both themselves and society? Without developing a sense of trust among their peers and educators, they will probably be more likely to strike out against the system- which leads me to Hirschfield's discussion of "low-performing and disruptive students" (45).

All schools, private and public, have students that are either unmotivated or unwilling to participate in school and, as a result, become a distraction to the other students around them. The big difference is that private schools have the capacity to handle such students, while public schools do not. Private schools possess the necessary manpower to either turn these students' attitudes around, or to send them packing. Public schools, on the other hand, cannot devote the time to such students due to the size of the student body. Furthermore, they cannot expel students as easily as the private schools. Therefore, these disruptive children become not only a menace to themselves, but to the entire school. The schools can partake in an inclusive system of surveillance, or an exclusive system of surveillance depending on the institution itself. This is the heart of Hirschfield's issue: the degree to which public schools partake in surveillance practices given their political and social status. The use of metal detectors, for instance, implies that schools using such devices do not trust their student body based on a variety of factors related to race, socioeconomic status, gender, etc. The geographic location of these schools plays a large role in determining the extent of security as well. Schools situated in low-income areas will have a higher degree of surveillance based on the stereotypes of the location itself. Such students do not even have a chance at a normal upbringing because they are taught to believe that they should not be trusted. They will graduate (if they graduate) with a skewed perception of reality because they will have been treated like delinquents for the first 18 or so years of their lives. Yet, is it even possible to turn the system around? How can we, at this point in time, take metal detectors out of schools at the risk of the safety of a number of innocent students? It is obviously the case that there will always be some troublemakers, but the majority of students deserve to be given a chance. Before they are conditioned to believe they are "trouble," could they grow up to be successful members of society? It seems like we will never know, because we cannot risk another Columbine for the sake of a social experiment: "to thousands of bitter and anxious students forced to pass through them every day, metal detectors stand as a daily reminder of how little power students have over those in whom they entrust their futures and, in turn, how powerless their trusted guardians are to secure for the students a dignified, timely, and safe passage into school (and adulthood)" (51). It is a cruel system, one that does not show signs of easing up anytime soon given the nature of today's generation and their parents' anxiety. A handful of "bad" students ruined it for the "good" ones, because without the bad there would be no reason to subject the good to such degrading practices- if only we could distinguish the bad from the good without using stereotypes, etc.