INTRODUCTION BY GREG WALTERS |
Raytown students wanted a crackdownon violence, guns in school.Making the right changes is tricky.
Originally
published on the St. Joseph Post
By Maria Benevento
In early February, Raytown
High School sophomore Harper York crossed the street to pick up some M&Ms
from a Casey’s store before her next rehearsal. Suddenly, she turned around
from the checkout and saw a “mob fight” had broken out.
When the chaos died
down and she got over her initial shock, Harper made a break for it.
“I don’t think I’ve
ever run so fast across the parking lot in my life,” she said. “And before I
cross the street, I look back and another (fight) is starting. … I can hear
police sirens and ambulances, and people are on the ground, and people are
crying. And it’s just like: Is this who we are?”
While the gas station fight
was the biggest Harper had seen, physical altercations in or near school had
become common.
Even bystanders weren’t safe.
A few days later, junior Chase Dernier ended up near a fight that turned into a
large-scale shoving match. He got slammed into a wall, hitting his head hard
enough to make it ache for days.
“A lot of us, we were scared
to go to school. We were scared to leave our class to go to the next class,”
Chase said. “We thought we were going to get caught up in a mob fight.”RAYTOWN HIGH SCHOOL
The last straw came
when school officials confiscated three firearms from students in a two-week
period.
Chase and Harper recruited
classmates and other district residents to call leadership, attend the February
school board meeting and sign up for public comment. They pushed for changes
such as longer suspensions for students who fight and adding metal detectors to
school.
Since that public
pressure, students say Raytown High School has made effective changes, such as
hall sweeps targeting students who aren’t in class. They’ve also seen signs
that the district is seriously considering other measures such as installing
weapons detectors.
Superintendent Penelope
Martin-Knox said fully solving the problems of frequent fights and guns
entering school requires combing through all the ideas to find what will
actually work.
Schools throughout the
country have been grappling with the ways traditional discipline and security
tactics can cause long-term harm to students who make mistakes, exacerbate
racial disparities and make school feel a little like jail.
Martin-Knox has also watched
other districts seize on solutions that fail, such as when weapons make it past
metal detectors.
“I don’t want to give people
a false sense of hope,” she said. “I just need to make sure that what we do is
going to be as effective as it possibly can be.”
Reiko Groves first appeared
in front of the school board to perform a song from Raytown High School’s
spring musical, “Six,” which reimagines Henry VIII’s wives as pop icons.
Reiko wishes she could have
focused on her performance alone.
Instead, still in costume,
the high school junior returned to the front of the audience and addressed the
board as herself: a teenager worried about guns and violence.
“I go from performing for
this great show that I was so proud of, to now I have to go speak about how,
even though I love the (school) building, I don’t feel safe in it,” she said
later. “I have to go fight for … almost my ability to perform (and) make sure
everybody’s safe while performing.”
After students’ basic
physical safety is secure, Reiko said, “we can focus on the well-being of our
students to find solutions to not only survive, but thrive in Raytown schools.”
Students say the school
climate hasn’t always been like this. But during the fall semester, violence
started to feel like an everyday thing.
Incidents reached a peak in
December, according to district data reported to the board. Students were in
school for less than three weeks that month. But during that time, there were
50 suspensions for fighting and school officials confiscated three firearms.
Harper said she started
begging her parents to let her stay home from school, even though it meant she
would miss beloved activities like theater rehearsals. Chase, normally proud of
his high attendance, was skipping school to lie in bed, feeling “mentally
drained.”
They weren’t aware of the
firearms found in December until later, but they did hear about three
additional guns found during a two-week period in late January and early
February.
The weapons weren’t fired or
brandished, Martin-Knox said. School officials found them by searching students
after suspicions were raised: a bullet found on a hallway floor, a phone call
about a social media post.
The students said they
weren’t planning to use the guns at school, Martin-Knox said.
“I heard the reasonings of,
‘You don’t know where I have to walk when I go home. You don’t know what
happens when I get off the bus. I have to go to a relative’s house in a different
community somewhere. And I just need to safeguard myself,’” she said.
But bringing a gun to school
is a “nonnegotiable” that comes with legal consequences and the student’s
permanent removal from in-person school, Martin-Knox said.
Consequences for fights can
vary, but some students have argued they should be harsher.
“They think they’re trying to
help the students,” Chase said. “But in reality, by lowering the suspension
rates, it’s not holding students accountable.”
A rumor that suspensions for
fighting have been uniformly reduced to three days from nine days isn’t true,
Martin-Knox said. But she has emphasized to principals that they have
discretion to set suspension lengths based on the circumstances.
Martin-Knox said schools also
need to figure out how to help students understand and take responsibility for
their actions when they return from suspension.
“Because otherwise,” she
said, “I’m going to send you back out there, (and) you’re going to do it
again.”
Schools nationwide are seeing
more verbal and physical aggression from students since the return to in-person
school after the pandemic, said Kenneth Trump, a school safety consultant.
Administrators face pressure
to solve those issues, he said, especially when there are high-profile
incidents involving weapons.
“It puts school leaders at
great risk of what I call ‘do something, do anything, do it now and do it fast’
type of policy and practice rather than having a comprehensive assessment done
of their safety,” he said. “We’re seeing many cases where that includes turning
to physical security measures, security hardware products and technology.”
Those solutions don’t always
work as promised, Trump said, especially when they aren’t executed perfectly.
Locally, Kansas City Public
Schools faced a lawsuit when a knife used in
a fatal stabbing made it through a metal
detector.
“Your
high school coach and a teacher’s aide and the principal working the screening
at the front doors, (who) probably got an hour of training, total, on a new
product they spent millions of dollars for in your district, is not going to be
comparable to the TSA,” he said.
And
when those staff members are pulled from other areas of the school, they lose
opportunities to interact, head off conflicts before they escalate and build
relationships with students who might be willing to tell a trusted adult about
a weapons plot.
“One of the best, strongest
security measures in a school is a visible, actively supervising adult,” he
said.
That has borne out at Raytown
High School, according to several students who credited a reduction in fights
to regular hall sweeps — where students late to class are locked out, rounded
up and warned or disciplined — and increased patrolling by security staff
and administrators.
Some of the security measures
can be double-edged swords.
Reiko says she understands
why the school no longer holds assemblies — they were leading to fights — but
is sad to miss out on the experiences.
The hallway sweeps can be
anxiety-inducing, and she’s been stopped and questioned more often while on
legitimate errands for her classes.
But she also appreciates the
reduction in fights and being able to go to the bathroom without finding all
the stalls filled by students skipping class.
“Probably the hardest part
about this is finding that balance between … making sure it is truly a safe
environment, but also not making it feel like it’s a prison or giving
punishment that’s too harsh,” she said.
Students said they’d
appreciate weapons detectors in schools despite potential drawbacks, such as
feeding into racist stereotypes and perceptions that the school is dangerous.
Martin-Knox isn’t ruling out
metal detectors in schools, but she says she needs to think through what
schools would need to make them work, such as locking and putting sensors on
additional doors and windows.
“I’m not going to invest
district money, taxpayer money, or even grant money on something just to say
I’ve done it,” she said.
The district has already
begun increasing security measures for sporting events, which can bring large
numbers of unknown people onto school grounds, Martin-Knox said.
At its March meeting, the
board approved purchase of a weapons detection system that it hopes will
streamline the security scans, spending $300,000 in Department of Elementary
and Secondary Education safety grant funding and more than $22,000 in other
district funds.
The system can be set to target dense metal shapes that might be a firearm, said Josh Hustad, director of facility operations, allowing people to pass through more quickly without taking small items out of their pockets and bags.
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