All are heartbroken over the recent school shooting. Many are praying for the families of those children and their rescuers. Bladen schools already have some safety measures in place; however, there is more that we need to be doing to protect our children.
Heritage Foundation has a great article outlining a four-step plan that includes:
1. Responding Pre-emptively: In order to pre-emptively stop school violence, it is vital to establish a psychological feeling of safety and react immediately to warning signs on social media or warnings from students about disturbing behavior.
2. Control Access to the School: We must control access to school facilities. Examples, metal detectors in every school, automatically locking doors. Safety fencing to protect students’ travel from one building to another. No one should be able to access school property except through a main entrance which is controlled.
3. Hardening the Classroom: Within the classroom, teachers must be able to provide their students both cover (protection from gunfire) and concealment (a place to hide).
4. On-Site Incident Response: Schools must have an on-site response capability that can confront and stop an active shooter. A school can have dedicated police assets on campus (SROs); hire private security personnel; seek volunteer security personnel from the community (such as veterans or retired law enforcement), and/or have armed staff.
Disarming law-abiding citizens is not going to solve this problem. It may make it worse. The present gun laws are regularly circumvented by those intent on murder. We must harden our schools.
Sincerely,
Jane T. Pait
White Oak
Leave a Reply