A recent Washington Post report on the exploding market for school security equipment and services caught our attention. It’s now a $2.7 billion industry, a figure that doesn’t include the millions spent on armed campus security officers. Metal detectors, facial recognition software, pepperball guns (whatever those are), bulletproof whiteboards (don’t ask), bulletproof backpacks, high-tech surveillance systems, private security guards, trauma kits, plans for active-shooter drills devised by security consultants—all peddled by firms eager for government contracts and purchased by schools eager to cover their posteriors with other people’s money.
The only problem? No one has the slightest idea if any of it makes kids safer.
One thing we’re fairly certain these expenditures do accomplish, though, is this: They fix everybody’s attention on the prospect of school shootings—and make students, teachers, administrators, and parents immeasurably more anxious about gun violence at school than they would be otherwise. That’s in addition to the obsessive coverage by national broadcast and print media for several weeks after each shooting event—the endless interviews with witnesses and family members, the search for the shooter’s motives, the long press conferences with police chiefs and FBI officials, the acrimonious wrangling about whether laws could have prevented it, and on and on. It’s enough to make you want to hide under your desk.
We therefore sympathize with Ajani Dartiguenave of Charlotte, North Carolina. When his school, Governor’s Village STEM Academy, “received a rumor of a threat,” as a spokesman later put it, school officials imposed an immediate lockdown that lasted about 35 minutes. The students, not unreasonably, assumed they were goners. “His friends were crying, and they thought they were going to die,” Ajani’s mother told reporters afterward. So distressed was the boy that he wrote a letter to his parents as if he thought he would never see them again: “Dear mom, right now I am scared to death. . . . I hope that you will be okay with me gone.”
School officials found no evidence that the threat was credible but defended their decision to put the school on lockdown, since they “had to respond to even a hint of a threat to best protect the students.” “All efforts are being made to ensure a safe learning environment for all students and staff,” the spokesman explained.
But that’s just the problem. All efforts are being made. Maybe leave off some of those efforts. Media frenzies aside, school shootings are exceedingly rare events, and by turning schools into wartime fortresses under siege, officials are turning students into emotional basketcases who think they’re going to die every time a grave voice comes over the intercom.
We wish more school administrators would avoid the safety-and-security mania. If they can’t, we at least hope those bulletproof backpacks come with boxes of tissue and bottles of Valium.
