IS IT POSSIBLE to make students in schools safe from violent people?
That question has been asked after Columbine and every other murderous attack since. The killing of the Amish students in the little school in Pennsylvania raises it again.
The Pennsylvania attack and one last week in Colorado have made it clear: There is not one threat to students and school staff — armed students on a rampage — but many threats. The killings in Colorado and Pennsylvania were not done by students, but by outsiders. Armed men broke into the schools, took students hostage and killed them.
No amount of student screening and no metal detectors at the door could have prevented either attack.
Lone maniacs are not the only outside threat to schools. As the Russians learned to their grief, schools can also be terrorist targets — places where determined people with a grudge can inflict maximum pain on a community or a nation.
Schools are targets for violence because they offer killers large numbers of helpless victims with few defenses in a confined space. Outside killers, whatever their motive, will not be deterred by revisions to policy handbooks or by signs directing visitors to register at the school office. Nor are they likely to be stopped by a security guard, even if that guard is armed.
Guards do offer some protection. So do locked doors. It would make sense to lock all outside doors at a school — while making sure the doors can be opened from the inside — and install a buzzer that sounds in the office when people want to get in.
But the only way to fully protect schools from outsiders would be to make the buildings prisons in reverse, intended not to keep children in, but to keep outsiders out. The cost of even one such school could easily consume the entire annual budget of a good-size school district.
And even in such a school, students would not be completely protected from inside threats.
In a violent society, no place and no person can be safe from violence. The best protection is an awareness of the danger.
To reduce violence in schools, it is necessary to reduce violence in society as a whole. Reducing violence at that level is not a matter of locking doors, but of molding minds.
In schools, that job is done in the classroom, not at the front door.
Schools must do what they can to protect students against immediate threats. But to assume that there is a way to perfectly protect the children is to embark on a futile quest.