NRA Says Arm Them, California Says Arrest Them

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

A middle school teacher in San Diego was arrested last week for bringing a gun and a lock-blade knife to school, the Los Angeles Times recently reported. The teacher, Ned Carter Walker, was arrested in the parking lot as he arrived at Farb Middle School and booked into San Diego County jail on two felony counts of possessing lethal weapons at school.

So much for the NRA’s proposal to arm teachers to defend against the imminent threat of homicidal maniacs who are hell bent on slaughtering Innocents as they cower helplessly in their classrooms. While a seemingly rational proposal (how are lunatics going to kill very many kids when every teacher can just pull out their Uzi and blow them away?), the NRA apparently neglected to do their research and overlooked the fact that this is illegal and would likely result in large numbers of teachers being jailed, forcing districts to replace them quickly with whomever was available—quite likely incompetents and pederasts. Yet for those in the know, the NRA could hardly be called a naïve organization. Their plan was quite likely the result of a conspiracy between with the prison guards unions to simultaneously increase gun sales and overload the prisoners, thus justifying the guards’ demands for greater prison funding and salary increases. Or maybe it was a conspiracy between the NRA and the billionaire philanthropists who want to weaken teachers unions and undermine the integrity of public schools by picking off so many teachers through arrests for weapons violations that the unions and schools would both crumble through attrition.

Seriously, though, bringing a gun to school seems a little foolish, on par with bringing drugs or pornography to school—not something you want to get caught with. Unfortunately, the Times did not report on the context, so we do not know if the teacher had been threatened or had any compelling need for protection. As many teachers know, not all administrators are competent at dealing with discipline issues and it is conceivable that this teacher had a legitimate reason to fear for his life. Perhaps a student had attacked him or threatened to do so. Maybe he even reported it to his administration, which ignored him. I heard of a situation where a dean called for the police because he felt threatened by an angry student and the principal, who was not involved in the interaction and had no way of knowing whether the threat was serious or not, cancelled the call, thus jeopardizing the dean’s safety. Just as likely, though, walker was just a run-of-the-mill gun nut who, like most Americans, is terrified of teenagers and believes them all to be drug abusing, law-breaking, untrustworthy, violent miscreants.

 Arrested and fired for lock-blade knife?

On a different note, a six-inch blade can be an imposing weapon, but there are also lock-blade knives that are two inches, or shorter, designed and routinely used as tools, reasonable and seemingly appropriate tools even in the classroom (e.g., opening packages, cutting string). It is bad enough that zero-tolerance policies are resulting in otherwise good kids getting expelled for possessing toy guns and Swiss army knives (the principal mentioned above expelled a straight-A student who had never been in any previous trouble for possessing a toy gun on campus). The question is, would this teacher be in the same kind of trouble if it was only a two-inch lock-blade and not a gun?

The New Witch Hunt for Psycho Children

Future Serial Killers! (Image from Flickr by Ano Lobb@healthryx

Every time there is a new school massacre, school districts across the nation reevaluate, refine and retest their emergency protocols. The emphasis is always on training teachers in security procedures and identifying potential psychos—even though school shootings account for fewer than 10 deaths per year—with little or no emphasis on providing better overall mental health services for all children at school or improving the conditions they face at home and in their communities (e.g., chronic poverty or physical, mental and sexual abuse)—problems that affect thousands of children every year.

Thus it is reassuring to hear that some school districts are now looking into improving overall mental health services in their schools. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Sunday that San Francisco Unified (SFUSD) is promoting a “new nationally recognized program to identify and help at-risk students,” in which teachers use standardized questionnaires to assess their students’ mental health.  For example, teachers are asked to determine whether a student often, occasionally or rarely seems depressed.

There are, however, several significant problems with the program. First, it requires teachers to do the job of mental health experts, something for which they are unqualified and untrained. While it is possible that this is intended to be the most efficient means of evaluating every child (there are far more teachers than mental health professionals in the school systems), it is also a way for districts to continue to underfund mental health services by having relatively inexpensive teachers do the work of comparatively more expensive psychologists and psychiatrists. Thus, while there may be improvement in the identification of children with mental health needs, there will continue to be insufficient resources to help them.

Another problem is that the program is inherently biased. For example, regardless of whether the program was designed in direct response to recent school shootings, its implementation now, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, will no doubt be in the back of teachers’ minds as they complete the surveys, potentially influencing their responses. Likewise, because the surveys are subjective (teachers are asked to rate each student on how often he or she exhibits each behavior), teachers could inadvertently (or deliberately) portray a student as at-risk because he was a disruptive thorn in the teacher’s side.

As a consequence of being so vague and open-ended the questionnaires are likely to lead to many false positives. Some of the questions could be answered affirmatively for large percentages of students who are simply typical teenagers with little to no risk of ever acting violently toward their peers, themselves or teachers (e.g., Is the student defiant or oppositional to adults? Does he get angry easily? Does she disrupt class activities or have difficulty sitting still?) None of these are evidence that a student will become a school shooter or even necessarily in need of mental health intervention.

According to the Chronicle, several teachers have already been disciplined for refusing to complete the surveys.

Education Dollars at Work: The DOE’s Private Arsenal

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, there has been considerable talk about how to make our schools safer, including the NRA’s proposal to put armed guards in every school. However, this is not why the U.S. Department of Education’s (DOE) Office of Inspector General bought 27 new Remington Model 870 police 12-gauge shotguns in 2010. Nor were these weapons purchased to improve graduation rates or close the achievement gap. Rather, these guns were obtained for the benefit of DOE’s secret identity as an elite education fraud fighting unit.

According to Valerie Strauss, the guns were purchased to replace their old guns, weapons they argue are necessary for their “high-risk” crime fighting duties. Strauss’ piece in the Washington Post quoted a DOE spokesperson who said the Office of Inspector General arrests people with criminal backgrounds, including some with “histories of murder or violence toward law enforcement officers,” and has “full statutory law enforcement authority.”

The one example that Strauss gave of such an investigation was a recent search of a Stockton, California home as part of an investigation of waste and fraud involving federal education funds.

It seems to me that if being robbed and embezzled by highly armed, violent insiders is pervasive enough to warrant having its own heavily armed police force, the DOE has been wasting taxpayers’ money with NCLB, Race to the Top, and all its other expensive “reforms.” Instead, they should be implementing sting operations in every district in the country, creating departments of internal affairs, hiring undercover agents and turning teachers into Serpicos to root out all this corruption and vice, and then using the billions of dollars recovered by these operations to buy schools more books, computers, support staff, librarians, nurses, counselors and decently paid teachers.

Iowa School Shooting Drill Criticized By Extremists

"Careful, boys. There're Children in There!" (U.S. Navy)

The San Francisco Chronicle reported yesterday that Treynor High School, in Iowa, will be having a “shooter on campus” drill. The Iowa Minutemen, an anti-illegal immigration group, is criticizing the drill because the fake scenario involves a teen who his vents his anger over illegal immigration by using violence. The state director of the Iowa Minutemen, Robert Ussery, said the drill was is in poor taste and had a political agenda. (As if his group isn't/doesnt?)

The best approach to the problem of angry students, regardless of the cause of their anger, is for the adults in the school to recognize when their students are having emotional trouble and to intervene. In the Columbine case (as in most instances of school violence) there were numerous warning signs that were either ignored or not taken seriously the adults in their lives.

School shootings and Columbine-like violence are terrifying, but they are also extremely rare. Many argue that it is better to be prepared, even for an unlikely event. However, it is a much more efficient use of resources and time to engage in general disaster preparedness. Many of the same things are involved in preparing for earthquakes, chemical spills, and meteorological disasters, as for school intruders and violent rampages. Focused drills and preparedness should be limited to only the most likely events, such as earthquakes in California, or tornadoes in the Midwest. 

 

Making School Safer by Arming Students

Modern College Student (Image by Nevada Tumbleweed)

This just in from Change,org: The Texas House has approved a new law allowing college students to carry concealed weapons on campus. While it is understandable that people are nervous in the wake of several recent shootings on college campuses, including one last year at the University of Texas, Austin, it is complete lunacy (and a statistical fallacy) to think that an increase in guns will somehow reduce gun injuries.

The plan is spearheaded by a group called Students for Concealed Carry on Campus. One of its members, Scott Lewis, was quoted by Change.org: "We're basically fish in a barrel. . . This is about changing the odds."

As is often the case, people like Lewis are reacting with emotion, in this case hysterically, in response to a scary, but relatively rare occurrence. Well over 90% of the violence against students happens off campus. The vast majority of violence that does occur on campus is not the result of guns, at least not yet. Once students are allowed to carry concealed weapons, routine arguments and misunderstandings may start to escalate into shootings. There will also be an increased risk of accidents, as happened this year at a Los Angeles high school, when a students’ concealed weapon accidentally discharged.

University of Texas, Austin, grad student Aron Weinberg believes that the law will indeed increase violence and accidents and has started a petition at Change.org against the new law. The chief of campus police, Robert E. Dahlstrom, and the city police have also come out against the concealed carry law.

Schools Are Jails (Piss Buckets For Your Kids’ Safety)

School or Jail (image by lavocado)

In the wake of two recent school lockdowns, LAUSD is now requiring all LAUSD classrooms to have a “lockdown kit” that includes a 5-gallon bucket to be used as a toilet. Kits also include toilet paper and a portable toilet seat, as well as first aid equipment, duct tape, gloves and flashlights. The shit buckets were apparently used by some students last week, who were locked in their classrooms for hours while cops and school officials ran around like chickens without heads.

As appalling as it is to think that school districts now consider violent school rampages so routine that classrooms must be equipped with bucket johns, it is even worse when they start to treat any disturbance as cause for a full scale lockdown and use lockdown procedures as a form of social control.

In the case of the Gardena shooting last week, a student brought a gun to school. It accidentally discharged when he dropped his backpack and two students were seriously injured. While this was a terrible tragedy and there was certainly need for emergency procedures, there is no reason why the entire school needed to be locked down for hours. There were no hostages, intruders or armed suspect rampaging through the school. The incident was self-contained. The room in which it occurred should have been quickly secured so that emergency workers could attend to the injured students and police could question witnesses. Once this had been accomplished, the rest of the school should have been allowed to return to their routines, or dismissed.

In the Woodland Hills case, police were searching for an armed assailant who had shot and wounded a school cop, near El Camino Real High School. Students from nine different schools were locked down for up to five hours as officers searched for the suspect. While it may be justified in cases like this to keep classrooms locked down for student safety, LAUSD’s own police chief, Steve Zipperman, admitted that students were locked down longer than necessary. LAPD and LAUSD blamed each other for the miscommunication and lack of coherent plan.

In both cases, students’ hygiene, dignity and wellbeing were sacrificed by police and school officials, not to protect children, but to make the grownups’ jobs easier.