Monday, November 18, 2013

Safe Schools

It's either funny or sad that so many teachers truly seem worried about what we should do if we were ever in an "armed intruder" situation on campus.  The probability of ever being in such a situation is very close to zero:
It'd be easy to conclude that school has never been a more dangerous place, but for the USA's 55 million K-12 students and 3.7 million teachers, statistics tell another story: Despite two decades of high-profile shootings, school increasingly has become a safer place.
I'm glad someone's looking at statistics here, as if emotion and scare tactics and dramatic reenactments on the evening news are how we should arrive at good decisions.
By nearly every measure, safety has improved and violence has dropped for students and teachers, according to recent findings issued jointly by the Justice Department and Education Department...

"We can't make our schools into fortresses — they can't be prisons. If you look at the frequency of these (shootings), it's not what we need to do."
A ghost of sanity?  We can hope. 

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