School Board Policies - Essay Example

Patricia James YOUR School Board Policies: Article Review To facilitate the discussion and development of a good security policy in light of the Red Lake High School shootings, I am submitting the article evaluations below with relevant observations: The first article or series of articles appear on the Jeff Weise web site (JeffWise.com 1-6). This is a site that, although tagged with the killer’s name, is dedicated to the victims and their families. In terms of drawing any security policy observations from the events themselves, it would be hard to imaging a policy preventing an occurrence of this type.

The young man killed his grandfather, who was a police officer, as well as his grandfather’s girlfriend; taking the officer’s weapons in his police vehicle, he drove to the school. Two weeks earlier, he had be expelled for “anti-social activities” and now returned armed and wearing body armor. His first victim was the school security guard and what happened afterwards could only be called a rampage that ended when Jeff took his own life. There are three general categories of policy which can be distilled from these events.

First, policies need to indicate how to responsibly deal with students who have the potential to become violent. In hindsight, if Jeff had remained in school in an on-campus detention, perhaps he would not have had the opportunity to act as he did. Secondly, there is the issue of external campus security. While schools should not appear to be fortresses, some sort of perimeter security might have alerted school officials. Finally, the matter of internal campus security is impacted by these events.

While teachers and students acted very bravely to prevent loss of life, there was no “lock-down” procedure in place. The second article appears in an educator’s trade publication and directly addresses school security in the post-Columbine era (Singer 41-48). The author references the increase of school shootings and educator awareness, but notes that even though some schools have policies like a “crisis document” which specifies staff responsibilities during an emergency, most teachers are unfamiliar with those policies and would likely not be able to follow them in an actual crisis.

The article then goes on to discuss various on-campus preventative measures such as locker searches and metal detectors. What follows is a section on proactive planning for a violent emergency, and one about attenuating the possibility of such an occurrence through counseling or anonymous reporting schemes. In terms of policy actions, all of this is good; but none of it would have prevented the Red Lake incident. A crisis document that included a lockdown procedure might have saved some lives; and a policy of mentoring or other intervention in the lives of youth who exhibit anti-social behavior at school might have made an impact on Jeff Wise.

At the school board policy level, however, there is a severe limitation when an individual decides to arm himself, crash onto campus in a police vehicle, and start shooting. The question for the writers of policy will be the balance between security and freedom. If we put a military-style, guarded perimeter around schools that are festooned with security personnel and no privacy at all for the students, the probability of another school shooting incident will certainly go down. The cost of that assurance will be high, however, as our children learn to fear everything and everybody.

Works Cited JeffWise.com. “A memorial to the lives lost at or near Red Lake High School.” 2005. Accessed 22 Oct. 2006. . Singer, Karen. “Security Measures.” Curriculum Administrator 37, 4 (2001): 41-48.