Funding a new age of security

As a blue-bleeding liberal, I’m always thrilled to see more money being poured into schools.

But last week when Gov. Mike Pence said more than $9 million will be dispensed among Indiana schools to improve security measures, I found myself at odds with this increase in school funding.

This isn’t because I don’t want schools to have proficient security in place.

The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary last December that claimed the lives of 20 students and the shooting in a Nevada school last month that left one teacher dead are concrete proof that American schools need heightened security.

As the brother of a high school freshman, I think anyone going into his school should be required to pass through a metal detector and show identifying credentials in addition to providing a valid reason for entering the school.

But schools shouldn’t have prison-like levels of security simply because schools are not prisons designed to keep children locked up for part of their day.

Schools are centers of learning where children should feel safe and protected.

Otherwise, an environment of productive education can never be fostered.

But the days of children walking into schools without jumping through hoops of security and protocol are over.

They may feel as if they’re walking into prisons, but it’s for their safety, and it’s the only way we know how to address the problem of violence in schools.

My issue is the fact that local schools now need this $9 million for security in the first place.

That shootings and gun violence have reached such a mainstay on the national agenda that we hardly blink when a new one occurs.

Instead of that $9 million being allocated toward improving education, increasing mental health care in schools or enforcing stricter gun control, we’re settling to fund
security — an inevitably last resort effort to stop violence.

Why remedy the source of the problem when you can just wait until the last minute to present the result?

This funding will allow Indiana schools to employ a school resource officer among funding other measures.

Of course schools should have security guards and threat assessments.

Of course our first priority must be to protect innocent children and their right to a first-rate education.

It would just be nice to live in a country or an age when we could read reports of $9 million going toward improving education and not intensifying school security.

­— wdmcdona@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Dane McDonald on Twitter @W_DaneMcDonald.