As a student, the last thing that I am worried about is my safety while I am sitting in class listening to a lecture.  But should I feel as safe as I do?  Based on many recent violent events that have occurred on school campuses I should not have that sense of safety.  Many school shootings have brought up the question of what needs to be done in order to keep children and students safe at all levels of education from kindergarten to college students.  School shootings like at Sandy Hook Elementary School where 26 students and teachers were killed (Waters, p.1) and at Virginia Tech where 33 students and professors were slain (Davies, p.1) should never happen, but they continually do.  It is obvious that the topic of school shootings does not need to be debated because no person is ever "in favor" of a school shooting.  However the preventative measures that need to be taken need to be discussed.  There needs to be more rigorous preventative measures taken to eliminate school shootings or even if they do happen to eliminate the high number of casualties that happen.  Rebekah Elliot states in her report, "While most lawmakers agree that there is a real need for enhanced school safety, most legislative responses following Sandy Hook have primarily focused on gun regulation" (Elliot, p.532).  This shows that even the top people in charge of making our schools safer are confused as to how to go about making this decision.  The two most common preventative measures for limiting school shootings that are being discussed are profiling potential school shooters and enacting more strict security measures.  People feel that both of these measures have the potential to decrease the number of school shootings, but I believe that there is one that will benefit the safety of our communities more.  Stricter security measures need to be taken at schools at all levels in order to increase the safety of the students and limit the number of school shootings that will take place in the future.

I believe that to decrease the number of school shootings we must start by taking a hard look at the current security measures of all schools.  If we want to stop shootings at our schools this is the essential first step to get the ball rolling in a positive direction, unlike now where it is only just a topic of conversation.  It is obvious that the number of incidents on campuses is rising, from December 14, 2012 to February 1, 2015 there have been nearly 100 incidents involving a firearm being discharged on the campus of a school from kindergartens to colleges (Kennedy, p.20-21).  This is an alarming number of instances where a student that is at school, to learn, is harmed from a lack of safety precautions at their school.  

There are plenty of safety measures to be taken at schools.  Technology is a leading force when it comes to making schools safer and it helps in a number of ways.  There can be video cameras installed around campuses to see what kind of activity is going on and who is on campus.  There are many access codes that are being installed on doors so that only authorized faculty and students are able to get into those rooms.  Doors being locked from the inside is also a new way to keep students safer and allow teachers to keep their classrooms safe in case a situation does arise and an intruder needs to be kept out.  Some schools are staring to put up more and more fencing in hopes that this will help.  Also, entries with buzzer systems have been added to a few amount of schools so that visitors cannot walk into a room or hallway without authorized personnel granting them access by buzzing them through.  So far one of the coolest and newest technologies that I have heard of is being used in the school district of Shawnee Mission in Kansas.  The new director of safety and security for that district, John Douglas, has implemented a system that allows a faculty member of a school to scan the identification of a visitor to see if they actually should be granted access into the school and if something shows up that intruder will be turned away (Kennedy, p.23).  Of course this system might have a hole or two in it but I believe by implementing some of these security systems that I previously mentioned our schools would be protected a lot better for future incidents.  

Another good model of a security system that I came across in my research is a school that has six zones of restrictions.  This proposed model starts with layer one that includes the public street that the school is located on.  Next comes the public and visitor parking lot.  Third is the staff and student parking lot that has restricted access. The fourth layer of security for this proposed school is enclosed school grounds with an entry sidewalk.  The fifth level of safety is the visitor entry point, which is the single entry point for all visitors into the school.  The final layer of security is the school's interior, this is meant only for authorized faculty and students (Gay, p.1).  This detailed plan lays a good foundation for what schools might want their security to look like and how they want the layers of their school organized.

The best system of security that I believe our schools can put in place is a combination of multiple technologies.  First, there needs to be a main entrance for all visitors and students to go through that has at least one faculty member to recognize students in the morning and verify visitors.  Secondly, the scanning identification method that I previously talked about should be used for all visitors; this would make sure that no intruders would get into the school.  Also, the buzzer system needs to be put in place to allow or not allow visitors into certain hallways and doors.  Finally, a system of surveillance cameras needs to be installed to monitor all the activities going on around campus and enable a faculty member to look for suspicious people on campus that should not be there. This plan would most likely take a large budget to put this into every school in the country but it would greatly increase the safety of students and faculty.  These security systems that are in place in many schools today are not doing their job to the fullest extent and by putting more money and consideration into these security measures would do a great deal of good in all communities.  More schools need to look at the way the Shawnee Mission District has set up their school's security systems and try to exactly model it or come up with something extremely close to it.

There is also a whole other side to this conversation and that is the side that believes the safety of our schools should rest in the hands of profiling.  According to the Merriam Webster definition, profiling means, "The act of suspecting or targeting a person on the basis of observed characteristics or behavior" (Merriam Webster, profiling).  There are some schools that are turning to this method to try to find the next school shooter or violent kid before he or she acts out.  This method is difficult to enact as you have a large pool of students to look at.  One model that is being proposed to schools to test and try out is automatic text analysis.  It has not been tested for school shooters yet but has been tested and been successful for other subjects.  Automatic text analysis profiling looks for a word or series of words that relates closely to a subject word like "depressed".  Depressed could be how a school shooter feels before he or she acts, so once that word is put in the database, the system then analyzes and looks for the word "depressed" and looks three words to the left and the right of the subject word to try to find potential shooters (Neuman, p.2).  This is a new and interesting way to find potential "at risk" kids.  This also requires looking at the texts of students, which is confidential information to those students so that puts this form of profiling in a sticky situation.

Another method of profiling is having teachers analyze and look for students in their classes that show warning signs of being a potential shooter.  These warning signs can be anything from obsession with guns to torturing animals.  The teacher or staff member at the school would then have to report the student to a social-service worker and they would take further control of the situation (Newsweek, p.1).  The final method of profiling that various school districts are starting to implement is similar to the one I previously mentioned.  However, this form of profiling uses a checklist of many signs and signals to look for in students.  The U.S. Education Department handed out this "early warning" violence prevention guide to every superintendent in the country This checklist was then given to all of the faculty at these schools and all of them are supposed to pay attention for these signs so that they can prevent further violence from happening.  Some of the signs that the checklist includes are bullying and drug use (Lord, p.1).  Many of these warning signs are great signals to point out which kids could be potential threats and even kids who look like they just need help.

Although profiling makes some good and interesting points about how to prevent school shootings, I do not believe that this is the best approach to take when it comes to preventing future violence and attacks fro students and outsiders.  The first reason that I do not believe that profiling will work is that some kids and outsiders will not be recognized by the profiling system.  The profiling systems in place are only there to profile students, this system will not be able to identify an outsider that decides to carry out a school shooting.  Once these people become committed to carrying out an act of violence like a school shooting, then what is going to stop them?  They will just simply slip through the cracks and come into the school and commit an atrocity that could have been prevented if the security systems in place at the school were updated.  

My next point as to why profiling is not the best option for preventing school shootings is because the teachers might not always pick up on a signal that a student displays.  All of these teachers are not psychologists, which will lead to some of these teachers accidentally ignoring an important warning sign.  Teachers are great at what they do but this is adding a lot to their plate.  They already have to deal with misbehavior in classes if they are teaching at a high school level or below and there are many college professors that don't even pay attention to their students during a class.  Also, many of these teacher's classes will be too large to see a student who may show a warning sign.  A teacher with 100 to 300 students will not be able to interact with their students or be able to recognize who they are in their seats so not all of the teachers will be able to spot a potentially dangerous student.

My final point on why profiling is not the most efficient way to prevent school shootings is that not all students that are identified as potentially dangerous are going to act violent.  There are many kids that check a lot of the boxes on warning lists like I mentioned previously but a majority of the amount will not become violent.  A video on NBC Nightly News stated, "The vast majority of students fitting this profile will never become violent" ("Psychological Profile of a Shooter, NBC Nightly News).  A good example of a kid getting identified as potentially dangerous, and not being dangerous at all, happened in Manassas, Virginia.  A 14 year old student was read his Miranda rights by a police officer for a response that he gave to an English writing prompt.  The student responded by saying "blow it up" but he was not done after that comment.  He then went on to say how the school should build "first class labs and top science teachers".  This student was suspended 10 days for his "blow it up" comment.  The punishment was later dismissed due to the fact he obviously had no intention of causing any harm to the school but was just misunderstood because of a poorly worded prompt (Lord, p.1).  It is instances like these why profiling is not the right choice for preventing more school shootings.  There are too many errors that happen like good kids being mistaken for horrendous killers in these systems and that just cannot happen going forward.

The topic of safety in our country's schools is a very prevalent one.  This is a topic that resonates with people of all ages and really everyone in the country.  Safety and protection is a large part of our world today and tragedies that happen near to us have a large impact on communities all around us.  By upgrading school's security measures we can limit the potential for school shootings and prevent outsiders from becoming a threat to people at school.  Intruders will not be able to get access to the school as easily and if for some reason they do breach the security many other measures like having teachers lock the classrooms from the inside and the buzzing through system will shut down these threats. 

There are many reasons that we need upgraded security measures in our schools and one large reason is the frequency of school shootings that has happened in the past few years.  These violent killers will keep coming if nothing is done to protect the young people of this generation.  Profiling is one option but not one that should be utilized going forward.  The inaccuracies of the system and large margin for error make this a good resource but not a system that needs to be put in place to prevent atrocities from happening to schools around us.  The best way to go about fixing this big problem is by upgrading the security systems in many of the schools around the country if not all of them.  More technology like surveillance cameras, identification scanning, and buzzing through systems will lead to a heightened level of security and will allow the people going to these schools to feel much safer as well.  The education that is offered in America is a tremendous opportunity and one that should not have to be passed up due to safety and security measures.  If we do not sure up the security of our schools then more of the younger generation will continue to suffer from these school shootings.  We need to tighten up the security of our schools for the good of the people in our communities and for the good of America.

"Psycological profile of a shooter." NBC Nightly News. NBC. 29 Feb. 2016. Television

Waters, John K. "KEEPING SCHOOLS SAFE. (Cover Story)." T H E Journal 40.4 (2013): 14-18. Academic Search Complete. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
