Can You Build School Peace with More Guns?

Students and Teachers Are Dubious about NRA's School Safety Proposal

When Principal Phyllis Woods rushed into Classroom 231A of John C. Fremont High School in the middle of a class with two security wounds in hand, the 12 students there seemed to know what was coming.

The six girls were called up to line up in the back of the classroom. Two female teachers – one of them being Principal Woods – wounded each girl as if she was going through an airport security check. In the front, two male school security staff looked carefully through every boy’s backpack. A girl wearing a pair of boots was asked to take them off. Two boys who had markers in their bag got their painting tools confiscated.

At Fremont, random searches like this take place everyday. And Fremont is not an exception – daily random searches are conducted in every school in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).

“We have to conduct searches because we have to make sure that there are no weapons on our campuses,” said Cheri Thomas, coordinator for school operations of the LAUSD.

Daily detections as such are essential for school safety, said Thomas. Police officers and other campus aids also contribute to this safety net.

In light of the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012, students and teachers in American schools may be expecting a new campus safety program put forward by the National Rifle Association (NRA), but those who go to LAUSD schools are not embracing it.

At the core of its new school safety framework, the NRA has proposed - through a report released early in April - to train teachers and other school staff to carry weapons on school grounds, reported USA Today. The primary goal of this new safety plan is to prevent future tragedies like the Newtown school shooting in 2012, the one in which a 20-year-old fatally shot 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Arming school officials is one of the only ways to make sure teachers can protect their students in time, said Asa Hutchinson, director of the National School Shield panel, to Reuters.

Students in some Los Angeles schools, however, do not fancy the idea of arming more school personnel outlined in the NRA’s proposal. Most of the students interviewed showed concerns for having teachers bringing guns to work.

“It’s really scary for students to think that their teachers would have a gun under their desk,” said Arleeza Williams, a current student at Fremont.

She sees the good intention underlying the new framework, but said it would be hard to implement it. A gun should only stay in the hands of the teacher who takes it, but anyone in school could find it and use it, said Williams.

“A student could get a gun if the teacher leaves it there or something and they could like…shoot someone else,” said Rocio Mazariegos, another Fremont student who shares Williams’s concern. Mazariegos do not support teachers going to work with guns because she thinks their job is to teach.

Most teachers at Fremont do not see bringing more firearms to school as a smart solution either, said Kenneth Adiekwe, assistant principal of the school.

Adiekwe concluded, based on his conversations with others, a dislike of the NRA’s idea among his colleagues. Some teachers showed intention to quit their jobs if they would be made to have guns with them at work. “They themselves would not be comfortable walking in that kind of environment,” said Adiekwe.

Even though the NRA’s plan comes with a good intention to keep vicious outsiders away from the students and school staff, misuse could be from someone within the school, said Adiekwe. A better way to tighten up school security, he said, could be an increase in patrols, because law enforcement officers know better the responsibility that comes with carrying a gun.

“We are not shocked when we see police officers with guns, but I’m a little concerned when I see the next neighbor teacher carrying a gun,” said Adiekwe.

Adiekwe’s suggestion on more police force in schools resonates with another crucial element in the NRA’s safety plan. In reality, the announced framework in April also had its emphasis – apart from arming teachers - on hiring more police officers.

At Fremont, two armed school police officers of the Los Angeles School Police Department (LASPD) patrol near the school premises to watch the students as they come to and go off school. “Security guards are good. They try to make sure…to keep us safe, even though students won’t like it,” said Williams.

Mazariegos said school police officers do protect students after school. When there is a fight among students, the officers would step in and break it up. “It’s a good idea so people won’t get hurt,” said Mazariegos.

Danny Chamez, an 11th-grade student at Fremont, felt that the school police stationed on campus failed to live up to their duty. The officers go out on a patrol everyday during lunch, but he seldom sees them around during the rest time of the day.

LASPD officers protect students from violence coming outside the school, but they are also there to create a culture where students recognize the boundaries of campus laws, said Thomas.

To that end, security officers on campuses patrol on a regular basis, and help school administrators with daily random backpack or locker searches at some LAUSD schools. “We have to conduct our searches because we have to make sure that there are no weapons on our campuses,” said Thomas.

For students who are against more school securities, an already heavy police presence on campuses, along with other security measure in some LAUSD schools, has discouraged students from going to school.

Julio Marquez, a former student at Locke High School in Los Angeles, quit school because he was fed up with a prison-like atmosphere there. “I’m seeing all these different police officers, weapons on school you suddenly see schools look and operate like prisons,” said Marquez.

In his eyes, school safety policies in many LAUSD schools, including multiple security checks on students and fencing around campuses, achieved little in protecting students. Instead, they hurt a student’s motivation for school.

“It’s very rigid and it has no life to it, no soul to it. You’re not going to want to go to that school,” said Marquez.

And some school police officers, he said, are creating racial profiling in the name of building school safety.

Leslie Mendoza, a former student at a mostly-white school in Culver City, said students of color there were often targeted in a random class search.

“They only pull out six people. They were mostly males…some females. And they were only black and brown,” said Mendoza.

Among all 1,008 students surveyed by the Los Angeles County Youth Justice Coalition, a nonprofit organization that advocates for juveniles, 70 percent of students they surveyed have had their backpacks searched by school police. Forty-eight percent said dogs have been brought into their schools to search for drugs.

Mendoza called random searches a waste of time. While the students were found clean in most cases, they would miss half of a class just to get checked, she said.

Marquez see students of color nationwide experiencing a vicious school-to-jail track in a school system guarded by police officers. In that system, youth of color have been handcuffed, humiliated, detained and interrogated by school police for minor offenses as small as being late to school, or get expelled simply for carrying marker or baseball caps, he said.

Students pushed out of their schools then turn to the streets because there is nowhere to go. “That just leads to arrest, and criminalization,” said Mendoza.

As of April 2013, Marquez and his fellow colleagues of the Los Angeles County Youth Justice Coalition campaigned to change some of the school security policies run in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Instead of spending more on arming more school personnel, advocates in the group want to replace school police officers with “peace builders” - community workers who understand the youth and their concerns due to a shared community background.

“You can get three peace builders with a police officer’s salary,” said Marquez.

A solution given by Thomas, from her perspective as an LAUSD coordinator, is one that brings parents into a joint effort to keep the students safe. She hopes to see more parents volunteering on campuses.

“In our elementary school, parents do a good job. As our children progress through our school systems, we see less and less of the parents,” said Thomas.

If parents could watch their children on their way to school, she said, it would help expand the resources the community has for protection.

“Our police can’t be everywhere,” said Thomas.

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