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February 7, 2019
Vol. 14
No. 16

After March for Our Lives: The Collateral Damage

      "It'll be just like going to a concert or the airport," our principal announces over the intercom.
      Every morning, after the pledge, we listen to our principal discuss the metal detectors and ID badges that will become part of regular school life. We will walk through metal detectors and get our bags searched every morning, and ID badges will be required for every student. Tension and worry settle in, the feelings only deepening as time goes on.
      In recent years, our country has become painfully aware of the violence that people are capable of, especially in schools. Since the Sandy Hook massacre in 2013, there have been 63 school shootings resulting in 67 deaths. A year ago, school shootings seemed to reach a tipping point in Parkland, Fla, and the world watched as students marched for their lives in Washington, D.C. For the first time, legislators and school officials were forced to listen to student opinion on the bloodshed gripping our country. At the time, my fellow students and I felt triumphant. Now, we're witnessing the fallout. Instead of investing time and money to fix root causes of school violence, like gun control and inadequate mental health services, legislators are putting band-aids on bullet holes and declaring schools safer. Schools all over the country are tightening security in response to mounting concern. Without involving students in school safety solutions and avoiding root causes, policy-makers have created a new problem and married it to an old one: learning in a lockdown culture where students must still fight to be heard.
      Libby, an 11th grader at my school, takes issue that students were not consulted before enacting new school safety policies. "If you want to make us feel safe, you have to know what will make us feel safe, and we're the only ones who can answer that," she says.
      Although many regard our new metal detectors as a deterrent to gun violence, research tells a different story. According to a Journal of School Health study, "There is insufficient data in the literature to determine whether the presence of metal detectors in schools reduces the risk of violent behavior among students, and some research suggests that the presence of metal detectors may detrimentally impact student perceptions of safety."
      So why has a surge of schools added metal detectors to students' daily routines? 10th grader Zach has a hunch. "I think it's most likely parents who were pushing for the metal detectors." Instead of focusing on parents' needs and surface interventions like metal detectors and clear backpacks, school leaders and lawmakers need to turn to students for strategies and solutions to end school violence. Most teens agree: to solve the issue of school safety, Americans must look at the root causes of gun violence—inadequate gun control and mental health interventions.
      Despite the Parkland students' tireless advocacy for gun control, we've seen no meaningful changes in American firearm legislation. These reforms are desperately needed. The U.S. has had 57 times as many school shootings than all other major industrialized nations combined, according to CNN. Assaults in the U.S. are three times more likely to involve guns than other developed countries, according to Vox. No matter how many statistics we rattle off or heart-wrenching narratives we share, we have seen no significant changes to U.S. gun laws.
      We have, however, some hope for positive changes that can affect the mental health climate in my school district. Our district approved a tax increase to staff our schools with more mental health professionals. That's a start, but there's still work to be done to establish counselors as a resource for student relationships. All my peers have counselors, but how many of us go to them with issues beyond schedule changes? Mr. Knapp, a math teacher at my school, also noted that recent overall cuts to education funding in Kentucky will lead to larger class sizes, which will make it much harder for teachers to connect with students and catch any worrying behavior. We can't create safer schools without investing in meaningful relationships between adults and students.
      Without meaningful changes that acknowledge student voice, relationships, gun reform, and mental health supports as the key tenets of safer schools, we students are desperate for anything to make us feel safer. Perhaps that is why, despite the angst it adds to our daily routine, most of my peers eventually embraced our new metal detectors. To me, this is surprising, until I pull back and look at the context of where I live. Here in America, gun violence occurs at an unprecedented rate. The U.S. has the highest gun homicide rate of an industrialized nation. And despite containing only 5 percent of the world population, our country contains 31 percent of the world's mass shootings. Last year, through walkouts and protests, students told the world that we don't feel safe in our schools anymore. In a more peaceful world, metal detectors in an educational space would never be accepted.
      Now, with a generation that cuts their teeth on constant news of bloodshed, we'll do anything to feel safer. We've given up our right to a positive, noninvasive school climate for an illusion of safety. It doesn't matter that metal detectors have been proven to be ineffective; the placebo effect is more powerful than any security plan.
      With heavy hearts, my peers and I continue to walk between those metal detectors, jump with every announcement, and panic over each gun threat — in short, continue to live as every normal American teenager does in this age.

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