AUGUST 31, 2000
SPECIAL REPORT--SCHOOL SECURITY
Have We Gone Too Far In Policing the Blackboard Jungle? | Security has become a booming business at American schools. But a debate rages on whether all the high-tech measures are necessary
| It's back-to-school day. The student is a little nervous as he gets on the yellow bus, but so far, it's all going smoothly -- the bus is waved through the barrier, and pulls up in front of the one-way security door. The young lad puts his book bag on the conveyor belt of the x-ray machine and walks through the metal detector without setting off an alarm.
After being photographed and fingerprinted by uniformed guards, he's issued his bar-coded ID card and directed to room 121. Noting the surveillance cameras and passing a gentle golden retriever, which he knows is not a mascot but an animal trained to go into paroxysms of tail-wagging joy if she whiffs explosives or narcotics, he slips his card into the slot by the door. He enters the room and takes a seat. Many of the other students have already arrived. Soon a friendly looking man arrives, using a card to get in the door. "Welcome to your first day at Central High," he says. "I'll be your homeroom teacher. We've done all we could to create a safe environment for learning. The rest is up to you."
A vision of the future? Hardly. This is an increasingly familiar scenario in 21st-century
education. Fueled by the shock over school massacres, such as the April, 1999, slaying of 13 students and the injury of 20 more at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., school systems are looking at technology to protect students and teachers from a perceived wave of violence. And not just in hardened inner-city neighborhoods but in wealthy suburbs as well. They are putting in place "zero-tolerance" policies to deter violent crime, theft, vandalism, and drug and alcohol use.
NATIONAL SECURITY. But the push for such high-tech security has set off a fierce debate among educators, who are neither convinced that today's schools are soaked in violence nor persuaded that stepped-up security is a real solution to the problem. "Drug-sniffing dogs, metal detectors, armed police in the halls, mandatory drug-testing, electronic and video surveillance, warrant-less searches, profiling 'dangerous' kids, rampant expulsions, and increased incarcerations just do not reflect the quality of life we hope students will embrace," insists Aaron Kipnis, author of Angry Young Men (Jossey Bass, 1999). "If we want them to behave humanely, someone in their world must model that humanity for them to imitate."
One of the leading advocates of high-tech security on school campuses is none other than Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. With the cold war winding down, this Energy Dept. facility, which was dedicated to providing security for the U.S. nuclear arsenal for 50 years, has turned to policing the blackboard jungle. "School crime is a concern of every family in America," says Mary Green, a school safety expert at Sandia's School Security Technologies & Resource Center (SSTAR), who has advised administrators at more than 100 schools and school districts across the country so far.
SSTAR is the brainchild of New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat who managed to get a measure through Congress in 1998 providing a two-year, $2.4 million funding grant for the lab's school-security program. The center's first project was collaborating with the Justice and Education Depts. to prepare a guide for schools titled "The Appropriate and Effective Use of Security Technologies in U.S. Schools." Available on the Web, it provides educators with advice on high-tech security measures akin to those in medium-security prisons.
"QUICK FIX." In late July, Sandia's Green hosted a three-day Dallas conference on "Security Technologies for School Safety." Among those attending were two leading educators from every state as well as the District of Columbia -- all expenses paid by the conference. Those at the meeting sat through workshops on school security led by lab experts and other conference sponsors, including the Justice Dept.'s National Institute of Justice and the Education Dept.'s Safe and Drug-Free Schools program. Presentations included seminars on everything from weapon-screening systems and duress alarms to drug-use-detection kits and the use of fences.
Like most conferences, Sandia's meeting also included an exhibition hall, where eager vendors hawked their goods. Some 50 companies showed off gear, such as CEIA's metal-detecting walk-though portals, Sperry West's covert surveillance cameras, Perkin Elmer Instruments' x-ray scanners, and Pharma Chem's latest drug-testing kits.
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Opponents of hyper-security note that adults kill more children every week than are killed in an entire year at U.S. schools by other children
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Has the world changed so radically that all this James Bond technology is an essential component of an elementary school? No, argues Bonnie Hedrick, director of the Ohio Prevention & Education Resource Center/Safe School Center at the University of Cincinnati: "We're turning to high tech because it's a quick fix and something tangible that administrators can show to their community as their way of securing school premises," she says. "Vendors of this technology have seized this opportunity to make money." Author Kipnis says that, as a seventh-grade student in the 1950s, "I usually went to school armed with a switchblade -- assaults along the walk to school were not uncommon. Sometimes, when I felt particularly threatened, I would also carry a bicycle chain in my coat pocket." (In the interests of full disclosure, so did this humble correspondent -- and I had a homemade "zip" gun, as well. Fortunately, my arsenal, like that of Kipnis, went unused.)
EXAGGERATED CONCERN? In a 1976-77 survey of school administrators, they reported that 1.3% of their students had been physically attacked each month, almost 8% of students missed at least one day of classes a month because they were afraid, and 3% reported being scared all of the time. These days, however, it's not about knives and bike chains -- its guns and drugs. And the student-safety patrol has long been replaced by real uniformed officers, often packing very real weapons.
A National School Board Assn. survey reported that 91% of the urban districts polled cited weapons as being a major problem, and more than 6 in 10 suburban districts and nearly half of the rural districts said weapons were a problem. Moreover, homicide has become the second-leading cause of death for those aged 15-24 years -- and the leading cause of death for young African Americans.
In a 1993 survey of classroom students conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health, 59% reported that they could get a gun if they needed one. Of that group, 62% claimed they could get a gun within 24 hours. And nearly 8% of school-aged youth reported that they had carried a gun during the past 30 days. Why? Almost all said they were afraid and felt they needed protection.
Yet little of the violence they fear seems to occur at school. According to the Justice Dept.,
adolescents are 14% of the overall population yet represent 30% of all violent-crime victims. Opponents of hyper-security at schools rightly note that adults kill more children every week than are killed in an entire year at U.S. schools by other children. "National surveys consistently find that school violence has stayed essentially stable or even decreased slightly over time," says Hendrick. "The school homicide rate is less than one in a million."
MEAN STREETS. But such statistics haven't stopped school systems from taking a hard line with students. In 1999, at least 15% of eighth-grade boys nationwide were suspended or expelled from school. For African-American boys, this rate jumps as high as one-third in many middle schools and high schools. In fact, African-American males are significantly more likely to be suspended or expelled at all grade levels than Asian, white, or Latino students.
Ironically, guns represented the smallest percentage of weapons-related expulsions in a 1997
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One pricipal found that high-tech measures reduced vandalism by more than 75% -- and fights, once a weekly event, dropped to one a month
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Education Dept. survey. Out of 74,000 weapons-related suspensions, only 16,000 students were suspended, expelled, or transferred for having guns. That year, more than 600,000 students were suspended for other causes. That may be because "toys" such as slingshots, peashooters, yo-yos, pen knives, and pocket folding tools, are more and more being classified as weapons by schools. "We see kids being suspended for inadvertently bringing key chains which have miniature letter openers or a laser penlight," says Louis Messier, a school-violence researcher at the College of William & Mary's School of Education. "The zero-tolerance policies are an overreaction."
And what happens when a student is suspended? Unfortunately, many educators argue, troubled students are simply returned to the street, where the real trouble is. And they are denied services that could help them break the cycle of violence. "Since adults, not kids, commit the vast majority of drug abuse, sex crimes, weapons carrying, and violence, we are now holding schoolchildren to higher standards of behavior, greater surveillance, harsher punishment, and lower standards of legal protection than we do adults," says Kipnis.
SIMPLE MEASURES. Moreover, the stepped-up security often provides an incentive for risk-taking offenders to beat the system, opponents argue. "The prisons of the United States are among our most secure facilities, yet prisoners fashion weapons every day and effectively conceal them," observes Lanny Lockhart Jr., a professor of criminal justice at Rochester Institute of Technology. "Schools have tried to use metal detectors to prevent the entry of weapons onto school grounds, yet the weapons still wind up being carried and used."
If we don't turn our schools into prisons, how do we keep them safe? Many of the ideas aren't new -- and they're quite simple. They include measures such as setting high expectations for students; involving parents, especially fathers; building relationships with students; providing students with learning tools from textbooks to computers; and initiating in-school suspension programs where offenders continue to learn and get help. "The keys to safe schools are as basic as communication, relationship, and empowerment," says Denise B. Maybank, director of education services at Boys Town USA.
Technology advocates, such as Sandia's Green, don't have any problem with such approaches. But they argue such measures should go hand-in-hand with modern security techniques. Indeed, Green's recommendations to schools are often as elementary as hallway and parking-lot lighting, uniforms to discourage intruders, the placement of a fence, addition of door locks, or simply rekeying locks when too many duplicates are floating around in the community.
But, technology proponents add, the equipment is here and it can provide the additional margin needed to avoid disaster. "Many problems in the criminal-justice system have been well addressed by the proper implementation of technology," says Rochester's Lockhart. "It's easy to see how people turn to this technology to help solve school violence."
BRUTAL YOUTH. In fact, they argue, stepped-up security may be the very reason that crime in schools is not increasing. For example, Sandia's SSTAR cites the experience of one pilot project at Belen High School in New Mexico. When students entered for the 1997-98 school year, they were greeted with a closed campus, metal detectors, ID cards, alcohol and drug tests, and school property tagged with identifying microdots. According to Principal Ron Marquez, the measures reduced vandalism by more than 75%, vehicle theft by more than 80%, truancy by 30% -- and fights, once a weekly event, dropped to one a month.
Patrick Sullivan is a co-founder of Security Voice, a Columbus (Ohio) company that provides an 800 number anonymous hotline at Safe-Call Helpline that enables students to report threats, drugs, and weapons. He warns that schools that fail to step-up security are doing so at their own peril. "U.S. teens are not only more violent than youth of previous generations, they are far more violent than other young people across the globe," he says. "Any school that thinks they are not vulnerable is really naive." Adds Pamela L. Riley, director of the Center for the Prevention of School Violence, in Raleigh, N.C.: "'It can't happen here' defined past school-safety efforts. We've now learned that 'it' can happen anywhere."
Clearly, some things have changed. In the 1940s and 1950s, the vision of school was Americana painter Norman Rockwell's image of a rosy-cheeked lad presenting his bespectacled mentor with a shiny red apple. Back then, classroom teachers ranked as their major disciplinary concerns talking out of turn, gum chewing, making noise, running in the halls and cutting in line, dress-code violations, and littering. Now, the popular perception is more akin to filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's rendering of vicious, alienated youth in A Clockwork Orange. Teachers surveyed in 1990 listed drug abuse, teen pregnancy, rape, suicide, robbery, and assault as their top problems with students.
OBSCURING THE FOCUS. School safety weighs heavily on the minds of parents and administrators alike. Certainly, technology has a place -- in school just as much as the airport. But the real issue is balance. "Efforts must be put forth to integrate school-safety efforts into the academic mission of the school, so that safety is not seen as the 'orange' to the academic 'apple,'" says Riley.
The danger is that the heightened concern for safety will supplant the real mission of schools -- education. That first day back to school in the year 2000 should be greeted possibly with apprehension but also with anticipation -- not fear and trembling.
Further Information:
The
Appropriate and Effective Use of Security Technologies in U.S. Schools
(PDF file)
Data from the National Center
for Education Statistics
Safety Strategy from
Developmental Research and Programs
Statistics on
school violence from the Center For The Prevention Of School Violence
By Alan Hall in New York
Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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