Students now teach school safety lessons

OPINION:

Kids aren’t as dumb as you think.

When they want to rumble at school, they are outsmarting teachers and even those electronic eyes that are supposed to help keep them safe.

Let’s go straight to the videotape.

A Muslim high school student in Palm Beach County, Florida, assumes the fetal position and shields her face as she is pushed to the ground and attacked by other girls. Amid the screaming crowd, someone yells, “Pull her hair.”

In a high school classroom just outside Pittsburgh, classmates cheer as two boys go mano-a-mano. At one point, a shirtless brawler dives on top of the other, repeatedly punches the other boy, picks up a podium and slams it against the other teen.

Outside a suburban D.C. high school, scores of students make their way toward school buses, but not to board. They do so to break out for an all-out brawl on the Suitland High School campus and to hide from the school’s security cameras and, presumably, teachers and other adults.

Yet, therein lies a key school safety question. Parents presume their children are safe once students step onto school grounds.

Where are the teachers, school resource officers and other grown-ups when these brawls occur on school grounds?

School safety became issue No. 1 in the 1980s as drug-related shootings and beat-downs in and around schools stirred heated debates around the nation for solutions. To change that violent culture, school systems changed who and what greeted students as they entered schoolhouses. Instead of teachers with smiling faces welcoming schoolchildren, security guards, metal detectors and handheld body scanners decided if students could enter.

School districts heeded another crime prevention call as well — school uniforms.

However, if you consider the violence of today, you have to wonder. Has the culture of school-related crime shifted, or have the purveyors of violence outwitted the adults?

The aforementioned fight at Suitland occurred three years after the jaw of a 16-year-old student there was shattered as he tried to protect his girlfriend during an attack by a group of students inside the school.

School authorities held a meeting to answer questions and quell parents’ fears, and at least one parent at that Suitland High meeting in November 2014 went straight to the point, saying what should have been quite obvious to other adults.

“It’s apparent to me that you guys aren’t visible in the school,” the parent said.

This time around at Suitland, students relayed the school fight via word-of-mouth and social media.

It should go without saying that school safety is as important as teaching and learning. Yet it seems school kids are teaching a lesson of their own: Students amplify their interests and intentions.

They know people are watching, too, because they instigate the fights, participate in the fights, observe the fights, record the fights on their smartphones and post the fights on social media for others to see.

How do you think the media get the details of what happened?

Keeping up with the Kardashians, if you’re into that, is easy peasy, and school officials must be as savvy to stay steps ahead of today’s social-media-crazed generation.

Kids might be unable to pass a standardized test, but their use of technology, at least smartphone technology, is years ahead of the presumably smarter adults.

Wise up, people. Wise up.

⦁ Deborah Simmons can be contacted at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.