Police in school: Solution or bad message?

Frontiersman editorial board

This is the age of messages sent. When one sports team defeats another by a wide margin, the color analyst tells us the victors sent a message to the rest of the league. When the president makes a statement about his resolve to use any means necessary to defeat terrorism and punish those who support it, talking heads explain that he's sending a strong message to some list of countries. Nothing we do, it seems, can be taken at face value anymore. We must consider the message.

Now, as Wasilla High School considers placing a police officer on campus, it may be worth delving into the message embedded in that decision. The factor that makes the program palatable to the district right now is the availability of a federal grant that would pay $125,000 over a three-year period to help fund it. The district would still have to cough up $40,000 to start the program and about $17,000 annually to maintain it. After the three-year grant concludes, it's anybody's guess where the nearly $42,000 per year will come from. Principals have assured at least one school board member that they'd "figure out a way to pay for it later."

This is more than a simple question of funding and logistics, however. There must be a message in there, somewhere. One school official believes the presence of a police officer would act as a deterrent to on-campus violence and drug abuse. A police official says vandalism and theft also drop significantly at schools that have regular police presence. Of course, that's not a surprise. If a police car parked at the same point along the roadway every day between 4 and 6 p.m., speeding would all but disappear along that stretch as soon as motorists figured out the pattern. It would do nothing to prevent people from speeding anywhere else, however, and you can't call that a success.

It seems the message here is that high school students are violent, they take drugs when they should be learning and they're vandals. The only way to stop that trend, the message seems to suggest, is to deter those behaviors by putting an armed officer on campus. We wonder if the students behavior might also be a message. Perhaps that message is simply that our priorities have been in the wrong place. Perhaps the message is that while we talk almost ceaselessly about a failing educational system, we also casually accept the notion that teachers are not compensated as well as they should be. We allow politicians to tell us that you can't solve the problem by throwing money at it, but we don't demand that they at least throw some elbow grease and creativity at it. And we have to wonder if you can solve it by throwing $125,000 at the police department to place a deterrent in the halls of education. That sounds more like a punt than a score.