You never forget your first fender-bender. For a pair of teenage drivers, theirs happened in the high school parking lot before the bell. One became “a little shook up,” as people say. Just to be on the safe side, the police officer requested an ambulance for a checkout, and the school’s office immediately notified their parents. The ambulance left without a patient, and the students went to second period. And then the school’s phones blew up – figuratively, not literally.
One of the companies that provides traffic information to radio stations heard the ambulance call on a scanner. During the traffic guy’s next reports on the stations he served, he told listeners there had been an accident with injury in the student parking lot at Plainfield High School.
The staff couldn’t keep up with the calls from frantic parents wanting to know whether their child was the injured party. Mind you, by the time these calls started coming in, everything had been resolved. The parent had arrived, their student had been checked out, and the emergency vehicles were gone. The administrators were trying to get the students to focus on getting to class, but they couldn’t get into the hallways to do that because everyone was handling calls from panicked parents.
A question that pops up on chatter pages a couple times each year involves the percentage of students whose parents drive them to school, rather than put them on the bus. While some parents have always preferred to transport their own kids to and from school, the number exploded after the shootings at Columbine High School. The number of “car riders” has continued to increase, driven largely by fear those children might come to harm if they were transported in another way. (The behavior of some “car drivers” is fascinating. I’ve watched several who will not move their cars until the school door closes behind their child. If that means delaying everyone else, so be it.)
As I’ve written before, school violence is nothing new. And Columbine is not the worst example. In 1927, a man in a small Michigan community killed three times as many people as Columbine’s shooters. Across the decades, you’ll find plenty of examples of violent behavior. The difference today is that the news is instantaneous and overwhelming. When a school shooting happens, our social feeds and TV station provide hours of coverage and speculation. The volume of content makes it seem like today’s schools are terribly dangerous places.
Guess what? There’s no place where your kids are safer than school. In fact, the places kids are most likely to come to violent harm are within the walls of their own homes. That’s not my opinion or conjecture, it’s what the statistics make clear. Your local park, your church, your favorite fast-food place – all the places you send your kids without giving safety a second thought are inherently less safe than their school.
It’s easy to understand why parents worry when they see endless rounds of stories about violence. For example, fear of kidnappings soared after Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her Utah home in 2002 – and an endless flow of well-intentioned Amber Alerts and social media posts about missing kids keep those fears stoked. But again, if you study the statistics, the number of reported kidnappings has plummeted over the last 50 years – and the vast majority of abductions that do happen involve custody battles, not “stranger danger.”
School buildings are designed to protect their occupants from a wide variety of potential threats using materials and technology. Plainfield’s first responders can remotely access security cameras so they can get a better sense of what’s happening inside before they arrive. More important, your community’s schools are staffed by people who are committed to protecting students.
When something happens at your child’s school or on the bus, please remember that the first priority for the adults is to ensure your student and others are safe, not to give you an immediate and complete explanation of whatever happened. Sometimes just gathering and verifying basic information takes more time than you may realize or like. And if the school doesn’t disclose information about what happened or which students were involved, please be aware that federal law generally prevents them from sharing most of that information with anyone except the students’ parents. It’s not covering up the truth – it’s simply obeying the law.