Prompted by three deadly schoolhouse shootings this month, President Bush is hosting a school violence summit today in Chevy Chase and lawmakers are considering ways to make schools safer, including one Maryland state senator who has proposed allowing teachers and principals to carry guns.
But area experts pointed out that schools are safer than they were 20 years ago and warn against overreacting to the horrific but isolated incidents. In Pennsylvania, a gunman killed himself and five girls at an Amish schoolhouse; in Wisconsin, a student shot and killed his principal; and in Colorado, a man took six girls hostage before fatally shooting one girl and killing himself. Closer to home, in the District, a 17-year-old was charged with shooting a student outside Cardozo Senior High School last month in what detectives said was a dispute between two groups.
This spate of national school shooting deaths differs from the Columbine shootings in 1999 in that two of the shooters were adults, not students, said William Chambliss, an American University criminal justice expert, who added that it would be futile to psychoanalyze the men.
The conference will be held at the National 4-H Youth Conference Center. It should discuss whether it’s worth turning schools into fortresses to deter the rare but terrible shootings or should there be more freedom for the students to learn and to explore their emerging adulthood, Chambliss said.
Jason Ziedenberg, of the Justice Policy Institute, in Washington, D.C., said he’d like to see President Bush note that schools in general are safe. He noted, though, that there are ways to make schools safer, such as smaller schools or the restructuring of schools.
More importantly, schools areideal places to deliver programs and services to keep kids safe when they aren’t in school, Ziedenberg said. Anger-management and peer-conflict resolution programs are effective in teaching students to settle disputes before they escalate, he said.
He said he opposes surveillance cameras, metal detectors and massive suspensions in most cases because they create such a negative perception that they make matters worse.
