On Guard

My sister lives across from an elementary school. The school makes me jealous.

I’m jealous of their vast green expanse of fields. I’m jealous of the kids enjoying their recess out in the fresh air, enjoying Tucson’s gentle February sunshine. I see kids chasing, running, climbing, swinging, playing – all of those things that kids were born to do. I hear the familiar shouts and squeals of kids at large. They’re the sounds of freedom. Yet they are, in a way, foreign, because I have never heard my kids make those sounds.

My school is quiet and secure, like an army base. Or a jail. School safety officers guard each entrance, and cameras expose all activities in stairwells and entrances and corners of hallways to their watchful eyes. The crackle of walkie-talkies is a constant, announcing the presence of the school aides who usher the students to and from the bathroom and up and down the stairs from the nurse’s office. Wherever the kids go, they go either in the lock-step of formation of the class en masse –the omnipresent “two straight quiet lines” -- or with the school aide’s hairy eyeballs on the backs of their necks.

I think it’s no coincidence that when I showed the kids a picture of a juvenile detention center (to show them where the character in our current Read Aloud, Holes might be living his days), the first thing J-- shouted out was, “It’s a school!” And you know, based on his prior experience with schools, he wasn’t wrong.

Now, my school has a reason, and a good one, for having such tight security. Something awful happened to some kids in one of those stairwells some ten years back, and we must take care that nothing like that ever happens again.

But I have to wonder what effect this level of suffocation, er, supervision has on the kids… because it seems security comes at the expense of freedom. And I’m not sure I’m willing to make the call on which is more important in the long run.

I also have wonder if the measures we take to make our school more safe actually make us feel less safe? Do the kids ever wonder why they can’t go anywhere on their own? Do they ever question what might be lurking in the stairwells and hallways, what is out to get them? Do they ask what it is that they need to be protected from? We tell them all the time that school is a safe place for them, but the cameras and walkie-talkies and security guards contradict that message. The message those things are delivering is that there is danger, that there is a reason to be afraid. Our security system is our silent admission to the kids that school (and by association, the world) is not as safe as we would like them to believe. Kids are no dummies. I’m sure they know that grown-ups haven’t been telling them the whole truth.

But still…

Is the world are we preparing them for really that scary? How scared should the kids be of it?

It probably depends on whom you ask. I guess it might be a question of whether you believe the world is mostly good, or mostly not. Perhaps it’s only as scary as we make it out to be.