10 minute read
Eye on Education
More Threats, More Security After Texas Incident
In the week following the Uvalde shooting on May 24, stories of additional violent threats in schools quickly surfaced, reports the K-12 Dive e-newsletter. Those accused of threatening school shootings ranged from men to teenagers and young boys. In Cape Coral, Florida, a 10-year-old student in 5th grade was charged with making a written threat to conduct a mass shooting.
According to the report, “The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective,” copycat behavior is common. “School shootings and other violent incidents that receive intense media attention can generate threats or copycat violence elsewhere,” it says.
While many schools take additional security measures after a shooting, studies show that some of the measures make students feel unsafe. “There is research to support that the presence of police, school resource officers, metal detectors, random locker checks, and clear backpacks are directly linked to the psychological trauma response,” Addison Duane, Ph.D. told K-12 Dive.
Holding additional active-shooter drills at schools after a shooting has been criticized for causing student trauma. In some cases, starter pistols are fired in school hallways to mimic the sound of gunfire, reports Gerard Lawson in the K-12 Dive article. The licensed professional counselor, who helped coordinate the response to the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, feels that there are more humane ways to conduct drills, and “there should be a grace period for kids to be able to decompress from a shooting situation.”
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Book Advises Students to Advocate for Phys Ed
“In her delightful new book, You Are Your Own Best Teacher!: Sparking the Curiosity, Imagination, and Intellect of Tweens, social scientist Claire Nader offers startling statistics,” writes Jay Mathews, education columnist for The Washington Post. “Decades ago, daily P.E. was the norm. These days, she said, only 4 percent of elementary schools, 7 percent of middle schools and 2 percent of high schools have daily P.E. the entire school year. Twenty-two percent of schools have no P.E. at all.”
The decrease is due, in part, to the fact that Americans “have never been that keen on exercise,” he says. Sharing the blame is the push to raise academic achievement, which allowed school districts to reduce or eliminate gym classes and save money by hiring fewer phys ed teachers.
Nader’s book offers suggestions to kids ages 9 to 12 on what they can do to improve their own education, Mathews reports. On the P.E. issue, for instance, Nader urges them to gather their friends and lobby teachers and principals. Letters to school officials and the media can also work.
Suggestions from other sources, like Powering the Future of Physical Education (plt4m.com) are aimed directly at schools to make simple but impactful changes. They include requiring P.E. every year and every semester, coordinating the approach to P.E. across junior and senior high schools “so it’s a continued experience of quality physical education,” removing the ability to opt out, increasing the budget for physical education, and investing in fitness facilities.
Ed Department Lays Out Teacher Recruitment, Development and Retention Initiatives
In June, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona laid out his vision for how the nation can elevate the teaching profession and support teachers across the country. He also released a fact sheet on how American Rescue Plan (ARP) fund investments in our nation’s educators can be sustained for the
long-term using other existing sources of federal funds.
Even before the pandemic, many states and communities experienced shortages in qualified teachers, including in critical areas such as special education, bilingual education, career and technical education, and science, technology, engineering, and math education. The pandemic has only served to make these shortages worse – falling hardest on students in underserved communities.”
Here are Secretary Cardona’s strategies for recruiting, developing, and retaining high-qualified teachers. • Investing in a strong and diverse teacher pipeline, including increasing access to affordable, comprehensive, evidence-based preparation programs, such as teacher residencies, Grow
Your Own programs including those that begin in high school, and apprenticeship programs. • Supporting teachers in earning initial or additional certification in highdemand areas such as special education and bilingual education or advanced certifications to better meet the needs of their students. • Helping teachers pay off their student loans, including through loan forgiveness and service scholarship program. • Supporting teachers by providing them and students with the resources they need to succeed, including mentoring for early career teachers, high-quality curricular materials, and providing students with access to guidance counselors, social workers, nurses, mental health professionals, and other specialists. • Creating opportunities for teacher advancement and leadership, including participating in distributive leadership models, and serving as instructional coaches and mentors.
To advance these efforts, the Department’s fiscal year 2023 budget request includes nearly $600 million in new funds – over funds included in the FY22 Omnibus – for a total of almost $3 billion.
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A Big-Picture Look at COVID-era School Attendance
During the 2020-21 school year, nearly half of publicschool teachers in the U.S. reported at least one student who was enrolled but never showed up for class, said an April 2022 article in U.S News and World Report. The information comes from data released in March – and updated in April – by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The data was pulled from a national representative survey of public-school teachers conducted by Gallup.
High school teachers were the most affected, compared to less than half of teachers in kindergarten to grade eight. Teachers in urban schools were significantly more likely to report having students who never showed up compared to those in rural and suburban schools, as were teachers who taught in schools where most students enrolled are students of color, compared to those who taught in majority-white schools.
“While teachers reported a range of obstacles that interfered with their students’ attendance, the challenges mostly fell into two big buckets – limited or no adult assistance or support at home, and difficulty learning in or adapting to the virtual environment,” said the article. For older students especially, competing demands on time – including providing care to a family member or work commitments that interfered with school – were common reasons for their absence.
The GAO report marks the first big-picture look at the obstacles that kept students locked out – even those enrolled in schools that provided support, like internet-connected devices and free Wi-Fi – and what it might take to bring them back.
“A handful of states and school districts have begun to report their own chronic absentee data on students who missed 20 percent or more of a school year, or roughly 18 days,” according to the U.S. News article.
Hedy Nai-Lin Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works, a national- and state-level initiative that addresses chronic absence, bets that most states and districts are underestimating the actual crisis. “The problem with the ‘20-21 data is that so much of it was remote and our attendance-taking practices during remote varied hugely,” she says. “You do see some increases, but my sense is that it’s probably, in most states, much higher.”
School
SECURITY
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variance in funding for school districts,” he says. “Some can afford top-of-the-line security solutions, which can include general construction of entry vestibules and that sort of thing. Obviously, security technologies can get expensive across a whole district. And not everyone can afford a high level of security. With the limited amount of funding available today, unfortunately school districts have to make tough choices. Sometimes that means not having an ideal security solution or posture.”
One thing that integrators, consultants, architects and engineers can do, according to Castillo, is help design campuses to deploy security technology in a more costeffective manner. “We can help design spaces that enhance security for as minimal an amount of money as possible,” he says. “Beyond physical security barriers, there are policies, procedures and other things we can do besides adding more cameras and card readers.”
Holding administrators responsible
“I just got done talking to a school board that had technology and other security measures implemented, but there were no checks and balances,” notes Fiel. “If they say all of their doors are locked and secured, but I can walk in the cafeteria door, I should be able to write them up and report it to the superintendent. We have to hold the administrators accountable.”
Timm says he would make school safety part of the overall evaluation for administrators, as it varies so much from one campus to the next, even within the same district. “I could be in a district where we are all supposed to be wearing IDs and the principal will say, ‘Yeah, it is just too hard to do that,’” he says. “I can walk into another building in the same district and the principal will say, ‘Everyone wears an ID here. I require it.’”
Despite the tragedy in Uvalde, Timm believes that the security posture of U.S. public schools today is much better than it was two decades ago. “In general, schools have secured vestibules at the main entrance and, in general, schools are required to practice drills more than just for fire. The number of incidents that have been averted because we were successful with threat assessment or by running a closed campus – we couldn’t possibly keep an accurate count.”
SecurityInfoWatch.com is the leading online news portal for the physical and cybersecurity industries featuring articles on the latest technology, risk mitigation and business trends impacting end users, systems integrators, and product manufacturers. Joel Griffin is the Editor of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at joel@securityinfowatch.com. jaxxbeanbags.com
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