Schools around the country are following Heath's lead. In April
1998, an Indiana school district became the first in the country to
install metal detectors in its elementary schools, after three of its
students were caught bringing guns into the buildings. This past January,
the U.S. Department of Education reported that nearly 6300 students were
expelled in the 1996-1997 school year for carrying firearms: 58% had
handguns, 7% rifles or shotguns and 35% other weapons, including bombs
and grenades.
Faced with such statistics, more schools than ever before are
buying security devices like spiked fences, motorized gates and
blast-proof metal covers for doors and windows. Administrators are also
signing up in droves for the services of security experts. Jesus
Villahermosa Jr., a deputy sheriff in Pierce County, Washington, expects
to run 65 sessions for educators this year, double the number held in
1997. "I'm completely booked," says Villahermosa, whose curriculum
includes how to disarm students and how to run lock-down drills.
Such measures may make schools feel less vulnerable, but how do
they affect the learning that goes on inside? Here again, research
provides only tentative answers. Citing neurological and psychological
research, Renate Nummela Caine, professor emeritus of educational
psychology at California State University-San Bernadino, maintains that
when students feel threatened or helpless, their brains "downshift" into
more primitive states, and their ability to think becomes automatic and
limited, instinctive rather than creative.
Regimented classrooms, inflexible teachers, an atmosphere of
suspicion, can all induce feelings of helplessness, contends Caine,
author with her husband Geoffrey Caine, a law professor turned
educational specialist, of Making Connections: Teaching and the Human
Brain (Addison-Wesley, 1994). "What schools are doing is creating
conditions that are comparable to prisons," she declares. "Where else are
people searched every day and watched every minute? They want to clamp
down and they want control. It's based on fear, and it's an
understandable reaction given the circumstances, but the problem is that
they're not looking at other solutions."
Psychologists say that surrounding troubled young people with the
accoutrements of a police state may only fuel their fascination with guns
and increase their resistance to authority Likewise, punishing young
people for talking or writing about their violent musings may just force
the fantasies underground, where they may grow more exaggerated and
extreme. "It's a response that says, `We don't know how to react, so
we're going to respond harshly,' "says Patrick Tolan, Ph.D., professor of
adolescent development and intervention at the University of
Illinois-Chicago. "If you're a child, would you come forward and say
you're troubled in that atmosphere? Are you going to rely on adults if
that is how simplistically they think about things? Rather than saying
something to a counselor, you might well keep quiet."
Suspending or expelling a student, moreover, strips him of the
structure of school and the company of people he knows, perhaps deepening
his alienation and driving him to more desperate acts. Kip Kinkel, for
example, went on his rampage after being suspended from school for
possessing a stolen handgun.
Yet there are punishments more severe and alienating than
suspensions and expulsions. As schools begin to resemble police
precincts, school officials are abdicating their duty to counsel and
discipline unruly students and letting the cops down the hall handle the
classroom disruptions, bullying and schoolyard fights. And the cops
aren't taking any chances. They're arresting students and feeding them
into a criminal justice system that sees little distinction between kids
and adults. "Once that police officer is on the scene, the principals and
teachers lose control completely," says Vincent Shiraldi, executive
director of the Justice Policy Institute in Washington. "I think it will
make students a more litigious group and much less able to solve their
problems peacefully and reasonably"
There may be a better way, and educators are beginning to look for
it. Instead of building schools like fortresses, architects are
experimenting with ways to open them up and make them more welcoming.
Designers are lowering lockers to waist-height and in some cases
eliminating them entirely, so students can't hide behind them or use them
as storage spaces for guns. Instead of being built on the outskirts of a
school, administrative offices are being placed in the middle, enclosed
in glass walls so officials can see what's going on. Gymnasiums and
auditoriums are being opened to the public, serving as meeting places for
the local chamber of commerce or performing arts group. "The kids feel
nurtured by this," says Steven Bingler, a school architect in New Orleans
who participated last October in a symposium on making schools safer that
was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and the White House
Millennium Council. "School doesn't feel like a prison to them
anymore."
On a more personal level, some schools are offering increased
access to counselors; others have hired a "violence prevention
coordinator" to whom students can give anonymous tips about classmates in
trouble. In accord with this less punitive, more therapeutic approach,
students who use threatening language are being steered into
anger-management programs, intensive therapy and to other support
services.
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