In K-12 education, nothing matters more than ensuring that schools — and the children within — are safe. The recent heartrending shooting at a Connecticut elementary school serves as a tragic reminder that violence is real. And it compels us to act.
Has the culture coarsened? Evidence is divided. Federal data show school violence has diminished. In North Carolina, school officials say crime and violence are down. New numbers presented by the Department of Public Instruction at January’s State Board of Education meeting indicate acts of crime and violence have declined 4.3 percent since 2010.
The devil is in the details. North Carolina’s crime and violence downturn occurred because schools reported fewer incidents of illegal possession of controlled substances, weapons, and alcohol. This is good news, but other indicators buried in DPI’s report are not. In fact, several forms of violence on campuses have risen since 2010: assaults on school personnel increased 5 percent, sexual assault rose 14 percent, assault resulting in serious injury jumped 20 percent, and sexual offense increased 15 percent.
What to do? Our national safety debate portrays gun control as a panacea. In February, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined 350-plus college presidents in calling for greater gun restrictions. Though well-intentioned, the college presidents’ proposals won’t make schools safe havens. And their opposition to legislation permitting guns on campuses and in classrooms would leave students vulnerable.
Should every school employ an armed guard, as the National Rifle Association proposed? Perhaps, but local school boards should decide if and where guards are needed. In reality, thousands of schools (mostly middle and high schools) already have armed guards or school resource officers (law enforcement officers trained to work in K-12 settings); some systems, including Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, have their own police departments. Collective outrage over the NRA’s proposal actually revealed stunning ignorance about school security measures. Even President Obama supports more SROs in schools.
State legislators are mulling new ways to protect schools, and wisely so. Legislation pending before the North Carolina General Assembly would authorize local school boards to designate armed, trained, and certified “school safety marshals.” School boards decide if marshals are employees or volunteers.
Such measures are sensible and necessary. Still, they won’t address the often-ignored root causes of violence. True, mental health issues garner some attention, but it’s cursory at best. And nobody talks about family breakdown. Yet a dysfunctional family is a significant risk factor for youth violence.
Though it’s politically incorrect to say so, fatherlessness hobbles family functioning in myriad ways. As scholar Stephen Baskerville has noted, “Virtually every major social pathology has been linked to fatherlessness: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, teen pregnancy, suicide.”
What about the graphic media violence that saturates kids’ lives? Suggesting that violent media promote violent behavior invites derision. But in a 2009 policy statement on media violence, our nation’s pediatricians — respecters of science — wrote, “The evidence is now clear and convincing: Media violence is one of the causal factors of real-life violence and aggression.”
Yet we do little to shield children. Unlike obscenity, reprehensible violence in interactive media is protected under the First Amendment. In a 2011 decision overturning a law prohibiting the sale of violent video games to minors, the U.S. Supreme Court wrote, “This country has no tradition of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence.” Indeed.
So we stand in the shallows, looking, as the poet Robert Frost wrote, “neither out far, nor in deep.” Shall we muster our courage and delve deeply into causes as well as correctives? We owe it to our children to try.
Kristen Blair is a North Carolina Education Alliance fellow.