Last fall, when we began considering the themes we wanted to tackle this year, students in many parts of the U.S. were returning to school after a year of remote learning. In many communities, including my own city of Alexandria, Virginia, local news and social media were abuzz with stories of misbehavior and fighting among students. Education Week reported on the trend, noting that school leaders were struggling to figure out which strategies would be most effective in stopping the violence — and most reassuring to the community (Sawchuk, 2021). The police presence might be reassuring to some, but is it effective? Improving the school climate and providing mental health supports might make a tremendous difference, but such work is slow and largely invisible to the community.
Large majorities of respondents to the PDK Poll, administered in June 2022, stated that they’d support having armed police, metal detectors, and mental health screenings in their local schools. And 45% said they’d support arming teachers. Yet none of these measures garnered strong support from a majority of the public, and only armed police received strong support from a majority of parents. To me, this indicates that the public is willing to try different things, but they aren’t committed to any single measure. Perhaps what they really want is for schools to put in security measures that work. And there’s the problem.
In this issue of Kappan, Meg Caven explores the complex questions school leaders face regarding school security. Armed school resource officers (SROs) might be reassuring, but there’s little research demonstrating their actual effectiveness and plenty of research linking school policing to the criminalization of Black and brown students. And in Charles Bell’s article, Black students themselves cry out for school-level responses to violence. Because they don’t feel safe, these students believe they must defend themselves with violence if necessary.
Caven notes there’s no simple turnkey solution that will work for every school and every community. She proposes that communities engage in rapid-cycle research to learn what works in their communities, with their students. Annie M. White and John Kenneth Weiss describe a Youth Participatory Action Research project in which students learned to lead restorative circles to improve their school climate. And in his Policy Solutions column, Jonathan E. Collins urges leaders to include students in conversations about what kind of police presence is appropriate at school.
These conversations will not be easy. In my own community, the decision to remove SROs from schools was highly controversial and eventually reversed. Multiple Educators Rising students in our Students Speak Up column noted that police on campus made them feel safe. A deeper dive into the research might change minds, and it might not. But a conversation that fails to weigh the evidence for any security measure against the potential downsides will not deliver the solutions our students need.
References
PDK International. (2018). The 50th annual PDK Poll: Teaching: Respect but dwindling appeal. Author.
PDK International. (2022). The 54th annual PDK Poll: Local public school ratings rise, even as the teaching profession loses ground. Author.
Sawchuk, S. (2021, November 1). Violence in schools seems to be increasing. Why? Education Week.
This article appears in the December 2022/January 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 4, p. 4.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Teresa Preston
Teresa Preston is an editorial consultant and the former editor-in-chief of Phi Delta Kappan and director of publications for PDK International, Arlington, VA.
Visit their website at: https://prestoneditorial.com/
