Safety, Guns, and Social Work: Stop Militarizing Schools and Start Supporting Students
by Ceema Samimi, MSSW, MPA
On April 20th, 1999, I was an 18 year old work-study at my college library. That morning, I sat at my desk listening to classical radio, like I did every morning, when the music stopped. The announcer reported that Columbine High School was under attack. They didn’t know how many shooters there were or who had been injured — but people were being shot at in the school. Four hours later, 15 people were dead and many more injured. The shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, had ended their massacre by committing suicide.
It was only a few months later that I learned about restorative justice. I was working with a local nonprofit to build their youth leadership team, and one of the areas we were trying to support was the implementation of restorative justice practices in youth-serving organizations throughout the city of Denver. Many of these organizations banned or “restricted” young people who had violated conduct codes, and we were hoping to implement practices that would address these violations without taking away the services that these youth were desperately in need of. Little did I know, at that same time that my peers and I were working to develop restorative and inclusive ways to addressing harm in the community, schools around the city and the Nation were moving in the other direction; implementing “zero-tolerance” policies and increasing the number of police in schools.
The idea that an increase in police in schools, often termed SRO’s or School Resource Officers, would result in a decrease of incidents of school violence was a popular one. According to the Bureau of Justice, the number of school resource officers rose 38 percent between 1997 and 2007. The results are beyond unsatisfactory. The existence of police in schools does not deter crime, but it does increase the number of students who are brought into the justice system and/or incarcerated for minor behaviors, as well as the number of students who are harmed, for example, by stun guns. The concern over SRO’s ability to navigate student behavior stems from several concerns, including a lack of training, lack of policies and regulation, and the role that SRO’s have in encouraging a school to prison pipeline.
It has been nearly 20 years since the Columbine shootings, and instead of implementing changes that would remove guns and support students, the response has been to intensify invasive security measures in schools, hire more SRO’s, and increase surveillance of students. One recent development is the addition of panic rooms that are installed inside classrooms with the capability of sheltering 40 students and 2 teachers, and are designed to withstand the bullets from assault weapons and other dangers. And let’s not forget arming teachers. Some schools already allow teachers to conceal carry, and the Florida Senate just approved a measure to allow some teachers to carry weapons. These measures, which in effect create militarized “safe zones,” seem to be the only solutions that lawmakers are willing to consider.
While these measures may appear reasonable or even necessary in an environment that puts students at risk on a regular basis, the facts show that school safety has actually increased in recent years. According the the National Center for Education Statistics, school crime has decreased since the early 1990’s. Between 1992 and 2013, student victimization declined 70%, and although most schools report at least one violent crime yearly, serious violent crimes occur in far fewer schools. Students are also less afraid of being harmed at school now than they have been in the past. Additionally, there is no evidence that police make schools safer.
It is within this context that we find ourselves in the wake of the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL on Feb 14th, 2018. I am now a doctoral student in Social Work, examining the relationship between youth voice, school discipline, and restorative justice. The students of Stoneman Douglas have rallied the nation to a call against arms, and it’s working. Corporations are pulling support for the NRA, social media is aflame with PSA’s and memes demanding gun control, and even Donald Trump has supported raising the age for buying assault weapons to 21. Two weeks after the shooting, Stoneman Douglas students announced they were organizing a campaign called #marchforourlives, which is scheduled for March 24th, 2018. The mission statement of #marchforourlives declares “School safety is not a political issue. There cannot be two sides to doing everything in our power to ensure the lives and futures of children who are at risk of dying when they should be learning, playing, and growing.”
What I have learned, both as a social work practitioner and as a researcher, is that rhetoric can be dangerous without context. While the #marchforourlives signifes an important and necessary moment in our Nation’s questionable relationship with the 2nd amendment, it is crucial that we interrogate the impact of statements claiming that schools are not safe, and consider who is not safe in schools, and in what ways.
As we center the voices of the Stonemen-Douglas and other students, we must also include the families, educators, and those in the helping professions that have been working tirelessly for a vision of safe and supportive schools. Movements such as Black Lives Matter, the Dignity in Schools Campaign, and the Dream Defenders have been calling for changes in school discipline and gun laws — including removing police from schools and installing social workers and other supports, as well as implementing restorative practices as an alternative to exclusionary discipline. But their calls have not received the massive public support that the #marchforourlives campaign has.
Police and armed teachers are not the answer, guidance counselors, social workers, and other supports are. The latest data from the U.S. Department of Education shows that 24% of elementary schools and 42% of high schools across the country employ a law enforcement officer. That number changes to half of all high schools where over 75% of the students are Black or Latino. Moreover, 1.6 million students are enrolled in a school that is patrolled by a law enforcement officer but has no school counselor, and 850,000 high school students have no access to a high school counselor. The American Counselor Association recommends one counselor for every 250 students, and reports that the national average in 2015 was one counselor for every 482 students — nearly twice the recommended rate. There are only two states that meet this recommendation: Vermont, at 1:202, and Wyoming, at 1:219. Additionally, the three of the five largest school districts in the country: New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, employ more cops than counselors. Currently, Colorado employs about 400 school social workers for its 1,888 schools.
It’s time for a paradigm shift. Instead of criminalizing students and militarizing learning environments, we need to implement practices that support all students; social, emotional, and mental health support, trauma-informed teaching and care, and restorative practices as an alternative to punitive school discipline. Instead of supplying schools with metal detectors and panic rooms, we should equip them with the staff and support that they have been devoid of for so long. It is imperative that we not only listen to the voices of the Stoneman Douglas students, but that we place them alongside the calls to action that communities of color have been demanding.
