How can we forget the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December, in which innocent children were killed and terrible grief was inflicted on many families? It was one of those events that will haunt us for a long time, and so it should.
But it should not determine policy. That should be determined by local conditions, such as the perceived threat that motivated Nanaimo school district officials to post security guards at three schools and the district’s office this week.
But it was a more distant event a Vancouver school trustee had in mind as he called this week for tightened security at his district’s schools. Ken Denike says he has received phone calls from concerned parents in reaction to the Connecticut shooting. The district has an open-door policy that should be evaluated, he said, and suggested changes that include controlled entrances, restricting access to one main door and keeping side doors locked.
There’s nothing wrong with regular examination of policies, but security procedures in schools on Canada’s West Coast shouldn’t be linked to a shooting nearly 5,000 kilometres away on the U.S. East Coast. Policies should be determined by local needs and conditions, not by events elsewhere.
Anything is possible, but we should deal with probabilities, not remote possibilities. The Sandy Hook shooting was an aberration, not the norm. Even in the gun-happy U.S., school shootings are rare occurrences.
Blame the media, if you like, for making it seem otherwise. News is about aberrations, about departures from the norm. The trouble is, when all we hear about are aberrations, we begin to think they are the norm.
But you wouldn’t read or watch accounts of how millions of students in North America went to school on Dec. 14, 2012 — and every other school day that year — and returned unharmed. You don’t pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV to learn what you already know; you want to know what’s new and what’s unusual.
That doesn’t mean the Sandy Hook deaths are irrelevant or trivial, or that we shouldn’t care, but the chances of such a thing happening here are remote.
“One of the most consistent findings of risk-perception research is that we overestimate the likelihood of being killed by the things that make the evening news and underestimate those that don’t,” writes Dan Gardner in his book The Science of Fear.
That doesn’t mean we should be complacent — bad things can indeed happen.
There has to be a balance, says Peg Orcherton, chairwoman of the Greater Victoria School District, where schools are safe but students are not taught to be fearful. She said the district has good security policies, which involve drills for students and staff, and those measures are constantly assessed.
Our children are likely safer at school than anywhere else they’ll be that day. There are few other places where the staff is as concerned about safety, so alert, so careful.
We don’t need to turn our schools into fortresses. When a threat is perceived, appropriate actions can be taken. That’s what happened in Nanaimo this week when school officials and police became concerned about the intentions of a former district employee and put the extra security into effect. It was a just-in-case measure, erring on the side of caution, but a reasonable move.
We cannot create a society with a 100 per cent guarantee that our children will be safe at every moment. We wouldn’t want to.
Far better to teach our children to be wise and street-smart than to try to insulate them from every remote possibility.
