Better safety options
I appreciate the WCPSS school board’s brainstorming methods to ensure that our student population feels safe so that the teachers and administrators can focus on education. I’d love to believe that posting an unarmed guard at each school would make it safer, but I cannot logically extend any argument for the use of unarmed guards to that conclusion.
An unarmed guard at Sandy Hooks Elementary would, unfortunately, have been another life cut short as Adam Lanza blasted his way into the school. Adding unarmed guards to make us feel safe and then assuming our problems are solved is a bad idea.
The $2.4 million would be better spent improving character education for students, training school professionals to help students with mental health issues that affect their behavior and performance at school and hiring a group of safety coordinators who work at the schools to review the safety at each school to help implement real solutions on a case-by-case basis.
In our quest to protect ourselves against some worst-case scenarios that are mostly a mental health problem, maybe a gun control problem, we must not pin hopes on quick-fix expensive solutions with low effectiveness potential.
Michelle Leonard
Raleigh
