It’s a nearly impossible task – finding a silver lining in the long, lingering, dark cloud of the COVID pandemic. But this might be one. According to the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security, there was a significant decrease in school shootings over the year in which most students had to resort to remote learning, with only one active shooter incident recorded in 2020.
But now it’s 2021, and students are returning to classrooms in numbers that we haven’t seen since the start of the pandemic. And while much of the focus is on keeping children safe from COVID, we cannot forget the necessity, and the difficulty, of keeping them safe from violence.
We got a harsh reminder of that this week in Springfield, on the very first day of the fall semester. Less than four hours into the school year, a fight broke out in a hallway at Southeast High School, resulting in a student being stabbed and two other students in custody. Thankfully, the wounded student is expected to recover. But it’s a harrowing reminder of the very real dangers that young people face in our community, with little or no warning.
It is also a very small consolation that the incident, horrific though it was, involved a knife rather than a gun. It could have been much worse. Now the question is, what will we do other than waiting for the next incident, which might in fact be much worse?
Periodically in recent years, the Springfield school board has debated whether to install permanent metal detectors in our high schools, maybe even in our middle schools. Usually, the debate happens after a deadly school shooting elsewhere in the country. It’s an idea that literally no one likes. That’s partly because it feels too much like an acceptance of a grim reality that we don’t really want to accept – that guns and other weapons of violence are far too easily accessible and readily available in our community, even by teens and pre-teens. But that is reality, whether we choose to confront it or try to ignore it. And we ignore it at our peril, and at the peril of every student in our schools.
There are other arguments against it. Superintendent Jennifer Gill points out that metal detectors are expensive to obtain and maintain. In order for them to achieve the objective – preventing students from bringing deadly weapons into the school – you would most likely need to have an armed police officer on hand at each entrance where the devices are being used.
Running every student through a metal detector would also invariably make arriving at school a much more laborious and time-consuming process. That’s certainly true, just as it’s true at the Sangamon County Building, where you have to empty your pockets (and sometimes even remove your belt) before you can enter. But people who have to go through that every day quickly learn ways to streamline the process – having their phone out and ready to put in the basket, leaving their loose change at home, and not bringing in items that will set off the metal detector, which of course is precisely the point.
Yes, metal detectors would be costly and use a lot of manpower. You know what also takes a lot of time and resources? Mopping up a student’s blood from a high school hallway.
Nobody wants to see metal detectors in our schools. But it’s not like the option will be any more pleasant and desirable if we wait until the next, possibly worse, violent incident in a school building. We’ve been rolling the dice for years. We shouldn’t wait until our luck runs out.
