Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has responded to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, by ordering “in-person, unannounced, random intruder detection audits” at schools.
The idea is to pinpoint access points and see how quickly an intruder could enter a school building without being stopped.
“The State must work beyond writing words on paper and ensuring that the laws are being followed,” Abbott wrote in a letter to Texas School Safety Center director Kathy Martinez-Prather. “It must also ensure that a culture of constant vigilance is engrained in every campus and in every school district employee across the state.”
A constant state of vigilance is not the culture we should be creating for our schools. A culture that requires a constant state of vigilance is a failure. It’s a failure of imagination, a failure of priorities and a failure to value children more than we value bloodlust.
Surely we can do better.
Abbott’s random intruder idea was met with swift criticism by education officials and policymakers.
“So you want grown men to show up to schools unannounced and try as hard as they can to find a way in?” Texas Rep. Diego Bernal tweeted. “This is a terrible idea.”
“If it really does mean breaking into a school, it could be an accident waiting to happen,” Clay Robison, a spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association, told the Texas Tribune.
The obvious solution to curbing school shootings — stricter gun laws and a ban on assault rifles, for starters — has so far eluded us, despite the relentless pace at which we endure them. (Education Week reported that as of May 25, there had been 27 school shootings in 2022 alone, and 119 school shootings in total since 2018, when the news organization started tracking them.)
Instead, children are made to endure active shooter drills and other workarounds whose effects are dubious at best, toxic at worst.
“There’s no evidence that highly sensorial drills better prepare students and teachers for an active shooter,” Melissa Reeves, associate professor of psychology at Winthrop University in South Carolina and past president of the National Association of School Psychologists, told me during a previous interview.
Reeves has written several books on crisis prevention and intervention in schools and has consulted with school districts around the nation after school shootings. I interviewed her when Illinois was amending its School Safety Drill Act, calling for parents or guardians to be notified prior to an active shooter drill, for the school to announce drills ahead of time, for the drills to avoid simulations that mimic an actual school shooting incident and for mental health professionals to be included in the planning of the drills.
As Reeves likes to point out, schools don’t conduct fire drills by lighting fires in the hallway. Parents don’t teach kids about stranger danger by paying a stranger to faux kidnap them.
In collaboration with the National Association of School Resource Officers, Reeves helped craft a “Best Practice Considerations for Armed Assailant Drills in Schools” document. It calls for, among other things, school-employed mental health professionals to be involved in every stage of drill preparation and an emphasis on inspiring “calm and confidence” in students.
Reeves also said it’s crucial to inform students and school staff about drills ahead of time, rather than springing the drills on a group that may include someone who’s armed.
“If you don’t realize it’s fake, someone who decides to pack a gun to defend themselves — student or staff — they don’t realize it’s fake and they could take out an actor,” Reeves said. “Clearly schools have laws calling for no weapons on campus, but you don’t know.”
What I do know is parents in this country spent the last two years screaming at teachers, threatening school board members, resorting to violence, even, in the name of students' well-being.
Surely we can muster the will to protect our children’s psyches from the constant specter of death with the same passion we devoted to protecting their psyches from masks and remote learning.
Surely we can demand more from our leaders and policymakers than a culture of constant vigilance.
Surely we can reject so-called solutions like springing fake intruders on our educators and push for, instead, a change in the law that allowed the 18-year-old Uvalde shooter to walk into a store and legally purchase an AR-15 — the same style of weapon used in the 2018 deaths of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the 2017 deaths of 58 people at a Las Vegas concert and the 2017 deaths of 26 people in a Sutherland Springs, Texas, church and the 2016 deaths of 49 people at Pulse nightclub and the 2012 deaths of 27 people at Sandy Hook and so on.
Surely this is not the best we have to offer our children, whose hopes and hearts and minds and futures are ours to hold and protect. Surely we can do better.
