FRESH EYES
The Wall Street Journal has a thoughtful piece in the wake of the tenth anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings. Some background:
"The carnage at Columbine High on April 20, 1999, prompted a swift and aggressive response around the U.S.
Hundreds of millions of dollars flooded into schools after two seniors stalked the halls of Columbine in trench coats, killing 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide in the school library.
The money -- federal, state and local -- bought metal detectors, security cameras and elaborate emergency-response plans. It put 6,300 police officers on campuses and trained students to handle bullying and manage anger.
Ten years later, the money is drying up. The primary pot of federal grants has been cut by a third, a loss of $145 million. The Justice Department has scrapped the cops in schools program, once budgeted at $180 million a year. States are slashing spending, too, or allowing districts to buy textbooks with funds once set aside for security measures."
But here's the encouraging bit:
"But as those programs fall victim to funding shortfalls, some educators are asking whether they might be able to take up the slack not by spending more money, but by reforming school culture to nurture closer bonds between students and adults..."
""A lot of what we learned coming out of Columbine didn't [require] large sums of money," said William Modzeleski, who runs the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools. "School safety is more than cameras, metal detectors and police officers."
The whole piece is worth reading on the lessons learned and apparently taken to heart. Now if we only started to look for common sense lessons from the post-9/11 era of airport security. Maybe we won't need to take off our shoes before boarding a flight in America...sometime in this life-time.
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