By Ryan Duffy
Scriptor
Wylie E Groves HS
1st Place Division 3, News Writing
Bylined Opinion Article
JUDGING CRITERIA
- Topic relevant to interests and/or welfare of school or students
- Wins reader interest with aimpelling lead that urges action
- Presents evidence/interpretation in logical sequence
- States issue; uses effective examples, facts and comparisons to clarify
- Deals with specific issue; avoids preaching, rhetoric and cliches
- Shows sufficient thought and knowledge of subject, developed with personal style
- Proposes solution where appropriate
- Sentences, paragraphs of varied length; written clearly, concisely and vividly
- Proper diction/grammar
Hands shaking, foot tapping, I entered Cass Tech on February 15. I crept anxiously through the doors of the south entrance. I gazed over all the students who were lined up, waiting to go through the metal detectors. My palms were sweaty as I got close to the security guard and the metal detectors. This start to my school day didn’t feel like the warm and inviting start at Groves. It felt like a the entrance to a prison and the students inmates, scrutinized by the very visible security system.
I quickly learned that visibility does not equal security.
I was six feet away from the metal detectors when a student walked through and a loud warning came from the machine.
The security guard was unphased by the unmistakable, insistent ding of the blaring alarm. He quickly glanced at the student’s bag and sent her on her way. Another student went through the metal detector and set off the alarm. The student slightly opened his bag, and the security guard peek over it and impatiently waved the student through. I trudged through the metal detector and felt relieved that no alarm sounded. Though it didn’t seem like my belongings or myself would have been searched if it did.
After going through Cass Tech’s security system only once, I realized there must be another purpose than security for the students who go through this process every day before school. I
shadowed Cass Tech senior James Ester, so I asked him what he thought about the metal detectors at the student entrance to the school. Ester confirmed that they were just for show.
“Man, like for real, that stuff doesn’t work. It’s really more to scare people. It’s easy to bring weapons into school. The detectors are more useful when there are people coming in from other places into the school because they don’t know that they don’t work. They used to have them working, but they got set off all the time, so now they put it on a lower sensitivity. I remember it used to go off every time someone went through,” Ester said.
Before I shadowed Ester, I considered that Groves might be a more safe place with metal detectors. Some argue that metal detectors are the reason inner city schools have fewer shootings than suburban schools where high profile shootings took place, such as Parkland, Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Stoneman Douglas. After my experience at Cass Tech, I think those metal detectors may be part of what makes others see inner city schools as dangerous. Yet this very visible, prison like entrance does very little to ensure the safety of the staff and students. As Ester told me, “Everyone here knows they don’t work. Well, they might go off, but they go off for every paper clip someone has, so the guards just ignore it. Everyone knows you can just hide something in your bag and security isn’t going to look past the first book.”
Just as metal detectors are useless at Cass Tech, they would be useless in Birmingham schools. Even though we fit the profile of the suburban school and have had a gunman on campus before, the appearance of invasive security would also not make us safer. The Groves building has exponentially more entrances than a school like Cass Tech. Cass Tech has only two main entrances that have metal detectors, and all students go through these doors. Groves, on the other hand, has four main entrances: the athletic doors, bus drop off doors, main office doors, and the doors in the commons. In a addition to these main entrances there are many side doors spread out through the school.
In a better move than metal detectors, Groves and all the other schools in the district are in the midst of implementing many new safety precautions that make the school actually safer but not feel confined.
On May 9, 2016 there was an armed gunman on the Groves baseball field, and Groves was sent into a lock down, but students and teachers were not prepared for this threat. Students who were in the halls when they heard the announcement didn’t know where to go. Like many districts at that time, our only plan was to lock the door with students hiding behind a desk or in a corner. We have learned from this experience that we need to better inform our students, teachers, and staff and that’s one of the reasons that ALICE is being put in motion. With alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate components, ALICE is a more proactive approach to an on campus threat. Under the Code Red that May, during the interminable hour when students and staff hid in dark rooms, they knew there was a gunman was on campus, but not who, where, or why. They didn’t know they were safer than they realized as the gunman was threatening only himself and on the baseball diamond. With the alert aspect of ALICE, students and staff would have known this key information and where to go for safety. Deputy superintendent Rachel Quinn and certified staff have presented ALICE to all the schools in the Birmingham district.
“Our collective awareness makes us safer when we have options and we are educated with our options,” Quinn said. “I also think that the update of all the security measures make us safer. These include the knox boxes which provide a key into the building for first responders, access for all the police to have digital maps of the school with the key fobs with all the buildings, and the technology we have installed with panic buttons located in the building.”
As well as ALICE, Groves renovated our security cameras and the camera system.
“We had 87 cameras in our building at this time last year, and now we have 131. We switched our format from an antiquated old system to a better system,” assistant principal Darin Wilcox said.
This new renovation not only increased the amount of cameras inside and outside our building but also created a new system that allows instant, two-way communication from Groves cameras to the Beverly Hills police station, less than a mile down the road. In case of an emergency, Groves can push a panic button to notify the police of a threat, and those officers can see through every camera at Groves. Unlike metal detectors, these cameras do not affect the everyday life of a student, teacher or staff member. Quinn highlighted how metal detectors don’t support the community and culture of trust the Birmingham district has already created.
“With metal detectors, you can end up with a feeling that you’re in some kind of a less free setting because you’re having to be searched every time that you are learning. It contradicts what we have, where we say, ‘come with an open mind,” Quinn said.
This trusting culture and community is exemplified by the UMatter week that Groves has annually. This allows for students, teachers and staff to get together to help address many of the issues students face such as depression and anxiety. One of the many things that Groves did for UMatter week was write every students name on a sticky note and put it somewhere in the school. This was a very inclusive activity where students could walk around the halls seeing their classmates names, and if they find the sticky note with their name on it they could turn it into the office for a piece of candy. This sense of belonging is important and goes hand and hand with school pride. Events like this and school pride help keep students positively engaged and in turn will make a student less likely to do something dangerous at school. Metal detectors, ironically, then would could also increase the chance of danger by undercutting our atmosphere of warmth and inclusivity.
While I began my journey to discover how metal detectors would make us safer by trudging through the security at Cass Tech, I’m glad I ended my journey walking more easily back through Groves’ doors and into a much more sophisticated system of security. Because our security is unseen is it also, paradoxically, ubiquitous. It is an ever evolving security that relies on critical thinking, community relationships, and a culture of trust, a culture where students help counter the threat, rather than roll their eyes as an intimidating guard glances past them.