School Security

Abstract

This article discusses public school security in the United States. The subject of school security has become a hot topic in light of school shootings and a rise in violence in American public schools. Data from the US Department of Education indicates that there were about 170,600 thefts and nonfatal crimes on school grounds among students ages twelve to eighteen in 2021, and 25 school-associated violent deaths between 2019 and 2020 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023). In light of well-publicized school shootings since the late twentieth century, as well as the rise of global terrorism, parents, educators and politicians have sought ways to improve school safety through comprehensive school safety plans. Conflict resolution has been a popular means by which students are taught to resolve their differences through dialogue instead of violence, but emerging research on the positive safety record of public charter schools indicates that reducing school violence may require more grassroots community activism and fewer government regulations.

Overview

Statistics published in 2023 by the US Department of Education and the US Department of Justice paint a sobering picture of life at school for the nations' millions of public school students. According to the government researchers, there were 25 school-associated violent deaths of students, staff, and other people from july 1, 2019, to June 30, 2020. Of these deaths, 23 were homicides, 1 was a suicide, and another a legal intervention death; 11 of the homicides and the 1 suicide were of youth ages five to eighteen. Furthermore, in 2021, students ages twelve to eighteen were victims of about 170,600 nonfatal crimes on school grounds. The data further indicate that in 2021, 7 per 1,000 students were victims of a crime at school (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023).

The problem of school safety is not limited to students. During the 2007–8 school year, 5 percent of city school teachers, 4 percent of suburban teachers, and 3 percent of rural teachers reported being physically attacked by students (Robers, Kemp, & Truman, 2013, p. iv). One teacher summed up her experiences in an urban public school this way:

“I started student-teaching filled with idealism, but soon my own thinking ran along the lines of locks and chains. In one month, a student threatened to kill his teacher over a quiz grade. Another student took a bat to windshields in the faculty parking lot. And when I asked the lead teacher why our classroom always had an odor, she explained that while a sub was on duty, a student had urinated on the carpet. Additionally, drug deals and violence in the halls were routine” (Schaller, 2007, p. 6).

During the 2020–21 school year, 7 percent of elementary school teachers and 1 percent of secondary school teachers reported being physically attacked by a student (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023).

Violence against teachers and students had prompted State Senator Bob Beers of Nevada to draft a bill in late 2006 that would allow the state's teachers to carry guns in the classroom. While the proposal was voted down in committee in April 2007 due to fears that it would put teachers in the role of law enforcement officials, supporters noted that Israel's legislative body passed a similar law. "They started allowing school teachers and administrators to be armed," said Beers, "and they have not had a single incidence of gun violence on campus since" (quoted in McCarthy, 2006).

Given these school safety statistics, as well as the series of high-profile school shootings from Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 to Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut in 2012 to Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida in 2018, it is hardly surprising that school safety and security have become top-of-the-agenda items for many public school districts across the United States. Addington et al. (2002) describe a study of student feelings of safety at school, both before and after the Columbine shooting, which revealed that the violence in Colorado had an impact on perceptions of school safety across the nation. While the majority of students did not report experiencing fear at school before or after Columbine, students were more likely to report being afraid of harm or attack at school after the shootings than before (Addington et al., 2002, p. 77).

While parents, teachers, students and political leaders continue to try to understand and address the roots of school violence, they are simultaneously pressing for practical measures to make public schools a safe environment for teaching and learning. These school safety measures range from the practical to the technological:

“Between the 1999–2000 and 2009–10 school years, there was an increase in the percentage of public schools reporting the use of the following safety and security measures: controlled access to the building during school hours (from 75 to 92 percent); controlled access to school grounds during school hours (from 34 to 46 percent); faculty required to wear badges or picture IDs (from 25 to 63 percent); the use of one or more security cameras to monitor the school (from 19 to 61 percent); the provision of telephones in most classrooms (from 45 to 74 percent); and the requirement that students wear uniforms (from 12 to 19 percent)” (Robers, Kemp, & Truman, 2013, p. viii).

Due to the specifically high increase of mass shootings taking place at high schools and even elementary schools such as Sandy Hook, a somewhat controversial practice being implemented to varying extents across the country is conducting active-shooter drills. Some schools prepare the drills for several months and actually involve both staff and students in real-life active-shooter scenarios. While carrying out these exercises has proven beneficial for developing more concrete plans for handling these types of violent situations, particularly at the elementary school level, some experts and parents have expressed concern over the amount of trauma that students may experience from engaging in drills that can involve the shooting of blank rounds and even fake wounds (Crist, 2017).

While these security measures have become a fact of life in twenty-first century American schools, it is too soon to tell whether they have begun to change the perception of public schools as vectors for violence. What does seem clear is that, when it comes to perceptions of school security, there is a sharp difference between those of school officials on one hand and parents and students on the other. A 2007 questionnaire posed to 10,000 superintendents indicated that 71 percent feel their schools have adequate security measures in place, whereas 29 percent do not. However, a national Harris Poll of more than 600 parents and 1,100 students concluded that 65 percent of youth ages 8 to 18 and 77 percent of parents say it is "extremely likely" or "very likely" that an intruder could enter their schools ("Fast Facts," 2007, p. 19). A 2023 Gallup poll showed that 38 percent of US parents were concerned for their children's safety at school (Jones, 2023).

Since 2013, twelve states responded to Sandy Hook by passing legislation that allows school staff members to possess or have access to a firearm while at school. After the 2018 killings at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, while students who survived the shooting started a nationwide gun control campaign, then-President Donald Trump and others called for increased training and arming of educators, with bonuses given to those who volunteer for training. Gun control advocates opposed such measures as dangerous and inappropriate for teachers to take on.

In light of the widespread safety concerns expressed by students and their parents, reducing the level of school violence and simultaneously increasing public confidence in school safety will no doubt remain major challenges for politicians, educators, parents and community leaders for the foreseeable future.

Applications

Developing a School Security Plan. Experts agree that the best first step to ensure school safety is a formal security plan. This plan should articulate clear policies and procedures for every security-related event—from identifying visitors and establishing penalties for bringing weapons to school to plans for a response to a severe weather event or terrorist attack. In most respects, a school security plan should be a subset of a broader emergency response plan.

The need for a clear, comprehensive security plan is obvious: while there were more than 183 violent deaths in schools between 2000 and 2021 (National Center for Education Statistics), in that same time period, there were thousands of assaults, instances of bullying, rape and gang violence, to say nothing of illegal drug use. A school security plan should articulate the school district standards regarding such behavior, as well as the consequences when students violate the policy. As with all policies, the greater acceptance by parents, school officials and local law enforcement, the better. An article in Security magazine (Zalud, 2006) cites creating the best possible school environment. Security experts agree that there is a diversity of policies, procedures and technologies being applied to secure schools. Certified safety plans should be created and tested and solid, informative but non-alarming communication should be used. According to the article, a new generation of kids will understand safety drills as well as fire drills (Zalud, 2006).

Parents also have a role to play in the creation or refinement of school safety plans. School security expert Kenneth R. Trump offers ten tips for parents who want to assess the security of their child's school:

• Ask your child about safety in his or her school.
• Identify comfort levels and methods for reporting safety concerns.
• Examine access to your school.
• Find out if your school has policies and procedures on security and emergency preparedness.
• Determine if your school has a "living" school safety team, safety plan and ongoing process, as well as a school crisis team and school emergency/crisis preparedness guidelines.
• Inquire with school and public safety officials as to whether school officials use internal security specialists and outside public safety resources to develop safety plans and crisis guidelines.
• Ask if school emergency/crisis guidelines are tested and exercised.
• Determine whether school employees, including support personnel, have received training on school security and crisis preparedness issues.
• Find out if school officials use outside resources and sources in their ongoing school safety assessments.
• Honestly evaluate whether you, as a parent, are doing your part in making schools safe (Trump, 2007).

To help implement or refine a school safety plan, the US Department of Education produced a one-hour webcast to provide parents, educators, school administrators and local safety personnel with an opportunity to review their emergency management plans. The department's Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools shares successful strategies so that all who share the responsibility of protecting school children can learn more about how schools can help mitigate, prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from a crisis.

A number of detailed school safety plan templates from the Imperial County (California) Office of Education are available to download and modify. Though produced in the early 2000s, much more detailed information on assessing school security threats can be found in Threat Assessment in Schools: A Guide to Managing Threatened Situations and to Creating Safe School Climates (2002), a joint publication of the US Secret Service and the US Department of Education.

Combating School Violence. To one degree or another, violence has always been a factor in public education in the United States and around the world. Eliminating it completely from any public school will always be the goal, and school counselors and others have studied and applied various methods for conflict resolution. Beyond the obvious benefit of reducing physical harm to students, conflict resolution methods have other benefits, such as creating a school environment that is more conducive to learning. The literature is clear that violence and aggression are in conflict, as it were, with the primary purpose of public schools. According to many school safety researchers, aggressive student interactions often permeate a school's culture and create a hostile learning environment that stifles the academic productivity and success of students (Bandura, 1973; Guetzloe, 1999; Olweus, 1995; Schellenberg, 2000, cited in Cantrell, Parks-Savage & Rehfuss, 2007, p. 475).

While conflict resolution remains a useful tool, accumulating evidence suggests that there are many factors affecting school safety, only some of which are adequately understood. A March 2007 working paper by Jon Christensen for the National Charter Schools Research Project at the University of Washington on levels of violence in urban public charter schools, for example, indicates that "teachers and principals in traditional public schools consistently report more frequent safety problems in their schools than do teachers and principals in charter schools." Christensen adds, however, that there are few apparent differences between public schools and public charter schools with regard to their policies and procedures: "It is not clear what accounts for these differences [in safety]. Apart from student dress code and uniform requirements, charters do not seem to consistently use dramatically different approaches to safety policy" (Christensen, 2007, p. 4).

Charter Schools. One possible explanation, not yet thoroughly pursued in the literature, is that public charter schools are safer because many parents choose to send their children to public charter schools precisely because such schools have a less violent reputation. Another factor may be that public charter school teachers and principals tend to deal with less government bureaucracy in exchange for more academic accountability.

Given this emerging research on public charter schools, it would appear that rigorous school security policies alone are not sufficient for reducing school violence and increasing student safety. Both the ecology of the greater school community and the degree of regular, operational oversight provided by government bureaucrats appear to be fruitful avenues of future research into the predictors of safe and unsafe schools.

Viewpoints: Rights of Students. American law has always sought to strike a balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of the larger group. The Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the US Constitution—was passed by Congress in 1791 as part of a promise to states concerned about the preservation of individual and state's rights under the new federal constitution.

The Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights protects citizens against "unreasonable searches and seizures." This comes into play in discussions of school security because students or their possessions are often searched as part of standard school security procedures. Whether such searches are "unreasonable" is somewhat subjective, and the constitutionality of certain types of searches has been brought before the courts.

In 1985, the US Supreme Court ruled in New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325 (1985) that "a search of a student by a teacher or other school official will be justified at its inception when there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that the search will turn up evidence that the student has violated or is violating either the law or the rules of the school" (White, 1985). The case in question involved a school principal searching a student's purse for cigarettes and marijuana after a teacher had reported that the student was smoking in the lavatory.

A decade later, the US Supreme Court ruled in Vernonia School District 47J v. Acton, 515 U.S. 646, 654 (1995) that random drug testing of students does not violate their Fourth Amendment rights. Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia explained:

“Traditionally, at common law, and still today, unemancipated minors lack some of the most fundamental rights of self-determination—including even the right of liberty in its narrow sense, i.e., the right to come and go at will. They are subject, even as to their physical freedom, to the control of their parents or guardians. When parents place minor children in private schools for their education, the teachers and administrators of those schools stand in loco parentis over the children entrusted to them. In fact, the tutor or schoolmaster is the very prototype of that status. (Vernonia Sch. Dist. 47J v. Acton , 515 U.S. 646 [1995]).

In a test of the broad applicability of Vernonia, the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled in Board of Education v. Earls (2002) that "urinalysis testing for drugs in order to participate in any extracurricular activity" was "a reasonable means of furthering the School District's important interest in preventing and deterring drug use among its schoolchildren and does not violate the Fourth Amendment." Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority of the US Supreme Court, affirmed Earls on appeal several months later.

Whether random drug testing is constitutional still leaves open the question of whether it achieves the intended result of making schools safer and more drug-free. The American Civil Liberties Union presents an argument against the random drug testing of students, suggesting that drug education and solid after-school programs and counseling are far more effective (Kern, Gunja, Cox, Rosenbaum, Appel, & Verma, 2006).

The debate whether mandatory security procedures violate the constitutional rights of citizens, including schoolchildren, will surely continue.

Terms & Concepts

Conflict Resolution: A method or methods by which individuals are taught to solve their disputes through dialogue rather than violence.

Public Charter Schools: publicly funded schools that enjoy greater freedom from government regulations in exchange for higher academic expectations. Under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, parents who send their children to federally designated "failing schools" can opt to send their children to a public charter school instead.

Safety Plans: Comprehensive, written documents that encapsulate what administrators, teachers and children should do in the event of a crime, natural disaster or terrorist attack.

School-Associated Violent Deaths: A homicide or suicide that occurs on school grounds.

School Safety: A combination of objective metrics and a subjective sense that a given school is a safe environment for learning.

School Security: The methods and practices put in place designed to prevent or reduce school violence.

School Shootings: Episodes in which an individual or individuals have inflicted harm via firearms on students within a school setting.

School Violence: A broad term encompassing any type of aggression against a student, teacher or administrator. This violence can range from bullying to the infliction of physical harm.

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Suggested Reading

Anthony, K. H., Johnson, S., & Nelson, J. (2016). Maximizing school safety measures in troubled times. Principal Leadership, 16(7), 46–51. Retrieved January 8, 2017 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source.

Beger, R. (2003). The "worst of both worlds": School security and the disappearing Fourth Amendment rights of students. Criminal Justice Review, 28, 336–354.

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Denmark, F., Gielen, U., Krauss, H. H., Midlarsky, E., & Wesner, R., eds. (2005). Violence in schools: Cross-national and cross-cultural perspectives. New York: Springer.

Elliott, D. S., Hamburg, B. A., & Williams, K. R., eds. (1998). Violence in American schools: A new perspective . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Regan, M. F. (2014). A False Sense of Security: Managing the aftermath of a crisis is what the author calls a 'new normal' for school communities. Education Digest, 79, 51–55. Retrieved November 10, 2014, from EBSCO online database, Education Research Complete.

Scherz, J. (2006). The truth about school violence: Keeping healthy schools safe. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education.

Sexton-Radek, K., ed. (2004). Violence in schools: Issues, consequences, and expressions. New York: Praeger.