(This story was originally published in The Elevator in June, 2023.)

For some people, the only thoughts students have in school are prison or “hell on earth”. For most, school is the safest place to be. According to the U.S. Department of Education, at least 95 percent of students find school more safe than being at home.

With a growing population, schools are changing and growing with their security officers and cameras, and buildings. Schools like Gardiner Middle School are getting new buildings with better security to help protect students and buildings like Oregon City High School are having remodeling done to add better safety measures like a vestibule or as Mychal Gann, Oregon City High School campus supervisor, calls it the “Vegetable.”

Recently, though, students have been feeling less and less safe at school with the numerous new security measures being put in. As more recourse officers and cameras get added into schools, the safety of students goes up, but the less the students feel protected. 

“In general, having police officers in school or on campus increases the risk that students will get arrested, removed, charged, taken off campus, taken into custody, and so on.  Unfortunately, that risk has increased especially for African American students, so there isn’t a lot of research that supports this idea that having police officers on campus actually makes things safer,” Kent McIntosh, a Professor at the University of Oregon who specializes in Special Education said.

Parental Involvement

This school year, Oregon City High School started a site council, which includes parents, students, administrators, and staff. This group meets monthly to discuss the different needs of the school. 

Dr. Kristene Baldwin, a parent representative, shared that “One of the first discussions that the site council had was around safety and security. Site council created a group that will meet with future administrators to ensure all staff, students, and parents have proper training, clear communication, and collaborative partnerships regarding safety and security.” 

This shows that many people are trying to help better the safety of their children or students. Not only that but also many of those site council members are trying to come up with plans to create better mental health services and bullying prevention.

School Planning and Support

In schools around the country, more and more of them have been creating programs to help students with mental health issues. With those programs being created, students are feeling better and more appreciated in school.

“In the last few years, a lot of students are coming back having faced a lot of traumatic events and some loss at home and certainly loss of peer groups or only being able to engage online or social media each other. Coming back to school and having everybody running around all over the place and noise and lots more interaction, I think sometimes some of us need to adjust to that. We haven’t given ourselves a little bit of a chance to practice how to manage ourselves when we sense that we are getting overstimulated.” McIntosh states.

Along with mental health help, bullying prevention plans are being implemented as well. Although, those plans aren’t helping as much. According to Lucy Lawrence, an 8th grader writing on One World Education “Bullying and anti-bullying efforts have almost synonymous results because both have negative effects on people’s futures.”

Teachers at schools like Oregon City High School aren’t as trained for these situations as they probably should be, so with the help of site councils and groups similar to it, they have begun to take training and awareness more seriously than they have in the past.

“We want students to be able to feel welcome and that they belong and that they are safe at school, and strangely enough, having to line up to go through a metal detector to go to school often ends up having the opposite reaction where students feel unsafe, unwelcome in the building,” said McIntosh.

Sufficient Staff and Training

Having larger numbers of students requires schools to find more staff, but with more staff comes more money needed to support their jobs. Without enough money, the schools don’t have enough funding to fund extra teachers and administrators, and other important staff required to run a functional school. 

With more staff to support the growing school community, means more training. Those new staff have to be trained on safety measures and emergency procedures for when issues arise. If those staff don’t get the right training, disaster could strike when they are needed the most.

Staff and students both need to

be trained for these situations as well. Especially when it comes to “one of the biggest problems at OCHS; students letting other people in through side doors that are supposed to be locked rather than having them go through the vestibule,” Gann declares.

When students let random people in, they could be letting in possible threats or problems into the school. Making those people go in through the main entrance, the school resource officer (SROs) and campus supervisors can check them in through the vestibule, allowing them to check badges or parents who are picking up students.

Collaborative Partnerships

Creating collaborative partnerships with people around the region could create a better environment for both students and staff combined. Schools could foster these partnerships with law enforcement around the area, emergency responders who could be reserved for any moment when a school might need them quickly, and community organizers like parents or community members who want to design a better future for the students. 

Having more security officers, better working cameras, and mental health group organizers would help the start of building a safer school system that would cause fewer school shootings and mental breakdowns from students having stress and school anxiety.

Online Learning

Some students and parents of students have anxiety from the thought that the school might get a massive bomb threat or someone will show up and shoot up their school, so they move to an online school, but that’s not always the best way to go. 

Most schools don’t have the best options for their students to move to online schools, causing them to get a lack of education, and setting them up for future failure.

“Less than 10 percent of students say they might switch to online school in fear of danger at school,” McIntosh mentioned.

Clackamas County schools around the area have started to hire people to develop better online programs for students that didn’t want to have the stress of school danger or covid for those who were still worried about it. But, schools like OCHS, have been having a harder time setting that up, making it harder for those same types of students to want to come to school, making them miss out on learning and building worse social skills and habits.