A community, not a fortress

Following the school shootings in Tacloban in June and Zamboanga in August, schools at all levels across the country have adopted stricter security measures, usually in the form of what security experts call “target hardening.”

Long queues of students were seen outside public schools in Zamboanga City with high student populations, according to a report by ABS-CBN. “Students of Zamboanga City High School West were made to form two long lines as they queued to enter the school gate early Monday morning,” the report said.

This development fits well with what Professor Cheryl Lero Jonson of Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, described in her 2017 scholarly article, “Preventing School Shootings: The Effectiveness of Safety Measures.”

Jonson argues that schools frequently adopt highly-visible measures immediately after a heavily-publicized shooting without first determining whether the measures actually work. She adds that fear, media attention, and demands that officials “do something” can produce costly policies with weak evidence and unintended harm.

Jonson’s analysis proceeds from the understanding that a school is more than a place to be secured. It is a learning environment whose atmosphere of care and trust must also be preserved. Security measures may harden the physical target while weakening the relationships that make the community worth protecting.

This is not to dismiss metal detectors and inspections as completely useless in preventing school violence. These measures can indeed intercept a weapon and deter the bringing of one into school. The question is when, how long, and how frequently such measures should be implemented, and at what cost to the school as a learning and social environment.

Like it or not, target hardening changes the meaning of entry in a school environment. Gates, guards, metal detectors, and searches tell every student that admission into the community begins with suspicion. Repeated daily, these measures send a conflicting message to our youth; that they are known and cared for in school, but they are also monitored, screened, and controlled.

As much as possible, let us use the least intrusive screening measure proportionate to the actual risk. Schools now have security units, and their job is not merely to harden the target but also to assess risk through proper intelligence and community-based risk assessment. Actual bag searches should be reserved for situations involving an alert or reasonable suspicion, and schools should continuously test whether these measures are effective.

When target-hardening measures become our principal answer to school violence, they reveal how many deeper layers of community protection we have allowed to weaken. Do Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) still function as community-building groups where parents and teachers can engage in dialogue, work toward collective security, and look out for one another?

And beyond formal groups like PTAs, those layers of protection also depend on the teacher who should notice a troubled student and the community that should intervene before a mental health problem escalates into violence. When these forms of protection weaken, the instinct is understandably to compensate with harder, more visible barriers, much like the higher walls around houses in a private subdivision suspicious of the communities around it.

There is an old saying that when we have more than we need, we should build a longer table rather than a higher fence. Perhaps something similar is true of security. When fear grows, our instinct is to build higher walls. But sometimes what has been missing long before those walls became necessary is a longer table, one with enough room for people to sit, speak, and develop fellowship.

Schools are communities, not fortresses.