Listening, learning and paying attention the safest way

It’s true that safety isn’t sexy. No one likes to talk about it much, but it’s an important part of our lives nonetheless.

Our hearts want to imagine that schools are places of refuge and safety, but our heads insist that we face reality and prepare for what might happen. Listening to recent news, it is easy to believe that school shootings are on the rise; five have occurred nationwide since the beginning of 2014. Some experts say that despite appearances, the actual number of shootings has not increased dramatically in the last several decades. What has increased is the reporting.

Nonetheless, according to Wikipedia, 69 school shooting incidents occurred between February 2010 and January 2014 — far more than during each of the previous two decades. During my own high school days, safety was never on my radar at school. We had the occasional fire drill, and I am old enough to remember air raid drills from my elementary days, but that was about it. Now we have monthly fire drills and twice-yearly drills for earthquakes, bomb threats and lockdowns. We have procedures to use in the event of a dangerous situation outside the school; for example, a shooter reported in the woods near the school. We also have lockdown procedures to use in the event of a threat to students in the school.

At Colony High, we work hard to ensure the safety of staff and students. This year, we conducted many of our mandatory drills right at the beginning of the semester. This schedule allowed us to minimize interruptions to classroom instruction and demonstrate to students that safety is always a priority. Our goal is to educate students about what can happen and how they can stay safe.

Last spring, the Alaska Legislature approved $21 million for the state’s five largest school districts to enhance safety and security measures. In Mat-Su, our share of the funds has gone toward increasing surveillance cameras, alarm systems and security gates. At Colony High, we’ve noticed the installation of three new electric security gates. The gates are helpful not just in emergency situations.

They can help control the movement of students and others during special events. For example, during school plays the gates can be lowered to help keep performers and audience members in the area near the theater, rather than allowing them free access to the entire building.

If necessary, an emergency button can be pressed that will bring down all three gates and disable the magnets on all the school’s interior doors so that they close. Staff have been trained over the last few years to keep our doors locked at all times, so that if they close during a fire or other emergency, those inside the classrooms will be safe. This door-locking idea is counter-intuitive to most teachers.

We like both the literal and metaphoric meanings of an open-door policy, but the locks are necessary, and we all recognize that. Just recently, I’ve started locking the doors to the library workroom in the uncomfortable recognition that most school shooters seem to head to the library, usually the place in a school where the most students and staff congregate at any given time.

Alaska remains lucky with just one reported school shooting since 1992: the 1997 incident at Bethel Regional High School, where Evan Ramsey fired a shotgun randomly throughout the school, eventually hitting and killing the school principal and a student. Ramsey, currently serving a 210-year prison sentence, stated in 2008 that no one had tried to stop him from taking the gun to school, although he says he told several students what he was going to do.

This raises the most important point about school safety: people have to talk to each other. Google “school shootings,” and you’ll see a list of articles all stating that school shooters tend to plan in advance, sometimes very far in advance, and that almost without exception, they tell other people of their plans. Potential shooters do not act suddenly or randomly. They express suicidal or homicidal thoughts, they tell other students what they are going to do, they engage in alarming behavior noticed by students and adults.

As is true in many cases, communication is critical. Students must share what they hear and know with adults, and adults working with students have a responsibility to talk to them and make every effort to get to know them. Class sizes are large and school days are busy; there are a million things that have to be done.

While it’s important to have doors that lock and gates to keep people in or out of a building, our best defense against violence lies in our human instincts — talk to each other and to take care of each other.

We must teach our children to talk to adults if they hear or witness anything that makes them fearful or suspicious of another person’s behavior, and as adults, we must listen and be attentive to the young people in our lives.

Prudence Plunkett has been reading and recommending books to Valley students for more than 20 years.