This is not the forum to discuss gun laws, but it is the forum to talk about school safety.  What are you doing to ensure that the children and families you serve are as safe as possible?  How do you do it?  Perhaps, we can start a conversation about how this has affected child care professionals.  Are you more likely to stay indoors?  Are you less likely to walk to a local park?  Were you additionally concerned in the winter, when children were being picked up and walked home in the dark?

Here is Marian Wright Edelman’s most recent missive on the subject.

Here’s a multiple-choice quiz:

Which of the following should be part of a model school safety plan?

a)  Proven evidence-based models for school violence reduction that focus on preventing misbehavior and violence by promoting a healthy, positive school climate.

b)  Threat assessment, emphasis on positive behavioral interventions, social and emotional learning, nonviolent conflict resolution, and community engagement including parents, students, educators, and faith and civic leaders.

c)  Trained mental health professionals (social workers and psychologists) and school counselors to identify problems early and support students and educators.

d)  Keeping school doors locked after the start of the school day, creating a space where children are safe to learn and teachers are safe to teach.

e)  Putting armed guards and more guns in every school in America.

f)  Arming teachers and principals.

g)  Putting law enforcement in charge of school safety and school discipline.

If you answered e), f), and g) give yourself a failing grade.  Despite the loud voice of the National Rifle Association (NRA), scholars, experts on school safety, and teachers overwhelmingly disagree with turning schools into armed camps rather than places of nonviolent positive learning. School safety is a non-negotiable priority. The current national debate about how best to achieve school safety is a natural result of the horror we feel when violence happens at a school like the unbearable Newtown, Connecticut massacre of 20 small children and their teachers.  We must do all we can to end school and community violence but we need to make the right choices and make sure the solutions are effective and do not create other dangerous consequences for children.

On March 28, the Advancement Project issued a report A Real Fix: A Gun-Free Way to School Safety that highlights what many people already know to be true:  more guns are not the way to achieve less violence in schools. In fact, adding guns and increasing police presence in schools can do more harm than good to countless children—usually children of color or with special needs who are suspended, expelled, criminalized and arrested for nonviolent offenses—pushing them onto a path to school failure, dropout, and the prison pipeline.

There is no evidence that armed guards or police officers in schools make children safer.  An armed guard at Columbine High School in 1999 and a full campus police force at Virginia Tech in 2007 were unable to stop the massacres that occurred at both schools. A 2010 review of existing research found no evidence that the use of police to handle school disorders reduces the occurrence of problem behavior in schools but there is evidence that over-policing leads to a new set of problems.

The Advancement Project and others highlight the city of Denver as a model for how to create a balanced approach to school discipline with student and parental input and avoid the too common overreaction by some in the wake of school tragedies. Denver public schools, like many Colorado schools, initially responded to the tragedy of Columbine by more vigorously enforcing zero tolerance policies and adding more police, security guards, and metal detectors.  Between 2000 and 2004, Denver experienced a seventy-one percent increase in school referrals to law enforcement.  The majority were for nonviolent behaviors like the use of obscenities, disruptive appearance, and destruction of non-school property, not the violent and dangerous behavior zero school discipline policies were designed to deter. Serious misconduct like carrying a dangerous weapon to school accounted for only seven percent of the referrals.

In 2008, parents and youths working with then-Superintendent (now U.S. Senator) Michael Bennet, led by the group Padres y Jóvenes Unidos (Parents and Youth United), worked together to successfully secure reforms that dramatically revised the discipline code, abandoning the post-Columbine zero tolerance discipline practices in Denver Public Schools.  Denver’s police now have a limited role in the schools and the district is making progress in reducing school-based arrests and the racial disparities in those arrests.  As the Advancement Project said in the earlier report Why Police in Schools Aren’t The Answer:  “We should learnfrom the policy choices made by the Colorado legislators and school officials—not repeatthem . . . Every dollar that goes into police, metal detectors, and surveillance cameras is a dollar that could have been used for teachers, guidance counselors, school psychologists, and program supports for young people.”

Although most of the mass shooters at schools have been White, boys of color have paid the consequences of overreaction and punitive discipline. The trend towards over-policing is most pronounced in schools with large populations of students of color, which are more likely to rely on zero tolerance policies and have a significant police presence in them.  As a result, the Advancement Project points out, “it is not uncommon for the same behavior that triggers little to no response in many predominately White communities to result in severe consequences in communities of color.” I am certainly for gun- and violence-free schools but there are significant dangers to young people attending schools that over-police and apply zero tolerance discipline policies to nonviolent offenses.

There are better ways for providing an effective model school safety plan, including the steps described in answers a), b), c), and d) in the multiple-choice quiz above.  Successful models for school safety plans emphasize relationship building among students, between students and educators, and with parents and the community at large; consistent reinforcement of positive norms through rewards or lessons; and individualized approaches to student discipline and intervention that seek to address root causes of misbehavior rather than to punish indiscriminately. Districts that consistently implement these kinds of practices don’t just see a reduction in suspensions and expulsions, but also improvements in measures of positive school climate and reductions in behavioral problems. And when children are positively engaged in learning with their educators there are fewer discipline problems.

The kinds of school safety plans we should be striving for are not plans to saturate schools with more guns whose only proven beneficiaries are gun manufacturers’, sellers’, and advertisers’  bottom lines. Our nation already has too many guns.  Now is the time to insist your elected officials vote to protect children not guns.  Tell them to support what close to 90 percent of Americans and 74 percent of NRA members want—universal background checks to make our country safer. Tell them you want them to do everything they can to make our schools safer for children but that turning them into armed camps is the wrong answer.

 

Yesterday, the Children’s Defense Fund publicized Edelman’s statement on gun violence.  I thought that I would reprint it here, just in case you missed it.

The heartrending massacre of 20 six and seven year old children and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut has galvanized public attention once again after a mass shooting. But the killing of children by gun violence is not new. It has been a relentlessly unreported and under-reported plague that has snuffed out the lives of 119,079 children and teenagers since 1979. That’s an average of 3,721 child and teen deaths every year for 32 years. That’s 4,763 classrooms of 25 children each. The number of children and teens killed by guns since 1979 is two and a half times greater than the number of U.S. military personnel killed in action in the Vietnam (47,434) or Korean (33,739) Wars, and over 22 times greater than American military personnel killed in the wars in Afghanistan (1,712) and in Iraq (3,518).

The United States of America has spent a trillion and a half dollars on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars so far, purportedly to protect our children and citizens from enemies without, while ignoring the reality that the greatest threats to child safety and wellbeing come from enemies within.

Gun violence saturates our children’s lives and relentlessly threatens them every day. It has romped through their playgrounds; invaded their birthday parties; terrorized their Head Start classrooms, child care centers, and schools; frolicked down the streets they walk to and from school; danced through their school buses; waited at the red light and bus stop; lurked behind trees; run them down on the corner; shot them through their bedroom windows, on their front porches, and in their neighborhoods. Gun violence has taught, entertained, and tantalized them incessantly across television, movie, and video game screens and the Internet. It has snatched away their parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, friends, and teachers; sapped their energy and will to learn; and made them forget about tomorrow. It has nagged and picked at their child and youthful minds and spirits and darkened their dreams, day in and day out, snuffing out the promise and joy of childhood and inflicting them with post traumatic stress disorders – often chronic. It has caused them recurring nightmares and made them afraid to go outdoors or to the movies. It has made them want to or feel they have to get a gun or join a gang to protect themselves because adults can’t or won’t protect them. It has made them plan their own funerals because they don’t think they’ll live to adulthood. It has killed them with guns every three hours and fifteen minutes and injured them every 34 minutes. It terrifies them and makes them cry inside and wonder if and when enough adults are ever going to stand up and make it stop and make children safe.

President Obama, in his moving remarks at the Sandy Hook interfaith prayer vigil at Newtown High School December 16, 2012, got it right when he said: “Caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.” And we will not pass the test of the God of the prophets or New Testament or all great faiths if we do not protect all of our sacred children against repeated and preventable gun deaths and injuries. Every child has a right to live and to dream and to strive for a future that is not destroyed in a second because we cowered before a special interest lobby and refused to protect them.

What can we do? Learn the truth about and debunk the myths that guns make us safe. Did you know that one third of all households with children younger than eighteen have a gun and 40 percent of gun-owning households with children store their guns unlocked? Contrary to what many people believe, having a gun in your home doesn’t make you safer but instead endangers you and your loved ones. A gun in the home makes the likelihood of homicide three times higher, suicide three to five times higher, and accidental death four times higher. For every time a gun in the home injures or kills in self-defense, there are 11 completed and attempted gun suicides, seven criminal assaults and homicides with a gun, and four unintentional shooting deaths or injuries.

Read the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF)’s new Protect Children Not Guns: The Truth About Guns, which debunks myths that guns make you safe. Convene congregational and parent and community study groups and let the enormity of lost child and human life sweep over you and pierce your hearts and make you determined to wake up, stand up and do something! Check CDF’s website regularly for steps you can take and that others are taking. Small acts by enough of us can set off big ripples across our nation and shake up our political leaders. The important thing is to care and to act and to keep acting for as long as it takes until the NRA’s lock on gun policy is broken. Stop shopping at stores that sell firearms over the counter – making their purchase and use as routine and normal as a flashlight or toaster. Assault weapons should not be normalized and treated as a household product or glorified as American as apple pie. Turn off the violent TV shows. Stop buying the violent toys and video games and call for nonviolent conflict resolution and restorative justice training of our educators, faith leaders, children, and all of us. Let’s make violence unacceptable rather than acceptable in our nation which leads the world’s industrialized nations in military expenditures, in number of guns sold and in circulation (an estimated 300 million), and in child, youth, and adult civilian gun deaths.

At the height of the Vietnam War, anti-war demonstrators filled the Mall and confronted the President, Congress, and Pentagon calling for an end to that war. What is it going to take for the American people–for you and for me–to push the President and members of Congress and Governors and state legislators to stand up to the NRA, gun manufacturers, and sellers? What is it going to take for them to place protection of children and youths and adults ahead of the protection of guns and profits and their election to office.? How much is a child’s life worth in today’s political economy in America?

In 2013, as we prepare to celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday and the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the dream of our gun-slain prophet of nonviolence, let us truly hear and follow rather than just celebrate him. Now is the time to free ourselves from the plague of gun violence which has taken over 1.3 million American lives since Dr. King and Robert Kennedy’s assassinations in 1968. This is twice the loss of life than all American battle casualties in all the major wars we have fought since our nation began: the Revolutionary War (4,435); the War of 1812 (2,260); the Mexican War (1,733); the Civil War (214,938); the Spanish American War (385); World War I (53,402); World War II (291,557); the Korean War (33,739); the Vietnam War (47,434); the Persian Gulf War (148); the Iraq War (3,518), and the war in Afghanistan (1,712). Isn’t it way past time for some hard soul searching about what we believe as Americans? Do we believe in the sanctity of life in America or don’t we? We decide.