Opinion: We cannot sacrifice normalcy in the effort to prevent school shootings

In light of the lives lost to gun violence at Georgia’s Apalachee High School on Wednesday, the nation needs to take courageous steps to get schools back to normal (to paraphrase White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre) when it comes to safety.

“This is not normal. This is not normal,” Jean-Pierre said in a White House briefing. “Students and teachers deserve to know that their schools are safe. They should focus on learning, not lockdowns. While the president and vice president have taken historic action to reduce gun violence, more must be done to keep our schools and communities safe.”

Tennessee provides the most extreme example of what we are prepared to do to stop mass shootings. It is actually allowing teachers to carry guns . But are the potential consequences and loss of community worth the effort?

The truth is, mass shootings claim more lives outside of school than at schools. They occur at restaurants, shopping centers, movies, bowling alleys and more. We cannot create a world of prison-like environments everywhere we go in the name of safety.

As a psychologist who has responded to mass shootings and researched their effects, there are mental health consequences to some of our efforts at school security. For example, installing metal detectors in schools was largely ineffective for safety and made students feel less safe at their schools. This kind of overreach can produce dystopian environments and arguably increases the risk of violence for some people.

We need to prioritize limited school budgets on what is most pressing and will have the longest impact. Although school shootings are on the forefront of everyone’s mind, they are actually extremely rare.

The National Center for Education Statistics reports 25 school-associated violent deaths in the 2019-2020 school year; 11 were homicides of youths ages 5-18 and one was a suicide. These are out of a total of 56,303,649 K-12 students . While any death of a young person is tragic, and we must do all we can to prevent such deaths, we need to follow the data and target the scenarios most likely to cause harm to our children.

Any school design improvements should follow an all-hazards approach on hardening infrastructure and avoid focusing exclusively on mass shootings. This includes minimizing the potential for harm from normal, everyday injuries of children on playgrounds and in sports teams to addressing the increasing frequency and severity of natural hazards due to climate change, as well as the rare instance of school shootings.

The priority of any physical design for a school or classroom should be on learning, child development and mental health, accessibility for students and community members with disabilities, and creating a sense of community. For students, this looks like environmental design that balances crime prevention with learning, community building and mental health support, according to the American Institute of Architects , which asked students to contribute to its design recommendations.

In contrast to metal detectors, students appreciate security measures that they will not easily notice, and strategic use of open spaces with natural light to create a welcoming atmosphere.

It is much more likely a school will have to contend with an extreme weather event such as a heat wave or severe storm with flooding or with natural hazards like an earthquake or wildfire. The Federal Emergency Management Agency offers guidelines to help schools improve their natural hazard safety.

There are many other effective things we can do to make schools safer. Things like anonymous or confidential tip-lines to prevent a tragedy from happening in the first place; having more school social workers, psychologists and counselors at our schools; having evidence-based bullying prevention and healthy relationships programs; and multidisciplinary threat assessment teams led by experts in child development are just a few ideas.

We all want to prevent rather than react to school shootings. The best options are supporting students’ mental health, creating healthy relationships and building the bonds of community.

Erika Felix, Ph.D., is a p rofessor of clinical psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a public voices fellow of The OpEd Project.

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