Why isn’t hyper surveillance a solution for schools?

Keeping students safe while studying is a highly sensitive priority; parents and teachers alike are terrified by the idea of a school shooting, a suicide in the student group, or a severe case of bullying that went undetected and was not stopped in time. These are all situations that can be prevented by being attentive and making the right decisions.

However, with the security strategies that we implement to monitor the students under our care, we could be falling into excess with dimensions as disastrous as those we originally wanted to avoid. The issue warrants greater reflection than merely reacting to fear of a threat or the consequences of an adverse event. It is necessary to consider whether hypervigilance is the best way to keep students safe.

Transparency does not solve the problem

The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida (Parkland shooting), and the previous event in the Sandy Hook school (Connecticut), among others, in addition to recent cases in Mexico, such as Monterrey and Coahuila, have forced educational institutions to rethink security strategies. In the particular case of the United States, in the face of continued denial by American society and the network of power in that country regarding the need to control the flow of weapons, the educational authorities turned to the only thing they could control, namely, the students.

The principal objective is not to allow a firearm to enter a school. The only way considered to achieve this is to be able to see exactly what each student carries in the backpack. Therefore, some schools began to implement transparent bags as a mandatory measure; others resorted to the popular policy of installing metal detectors in their entrances. Meanwhile, other schools even sought the support of the police.

However, there have been no definitive figures or statistics that demonstrate that the use of transparent backpacks is a measure that decreases the frequency of school shootings. Yes, it can be said that they are good deterrents for many students, preventing them from entering the school with prohibited items. Still, this institutional diminution of student privacy could be potentializing another old problem of educational experience: bullying.

Connor Fulbright, a high school student in the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, initiated a petition on Change.org specifically addressed to Mark Henry, the district’s superintendent. “A clear backpack will do nothing more than increase the risk of another tragedy. The root of a vast majority of school shootings is bullying. Exposing the personal items of students will increase instances of bullying and will inevitably elevate the risk of a school shooter,” the petition stated.

The student contends that bullying is the first indicator that a school is not safe; it is a harbinger, the canary in the coal mine. If students at an educational institution suffer from bullying frequently, they are much more likely to bring guns to school.

According to a report of the National Center for Education Statistics published in 2017, 16 % of the students between the ages of 9 and 12 reported having carried weapons; 4% said having entered their schools with them. An alarming 95% of perpetrators of gun violence in educational institutions are pupils.

One study of the National Threat Assessment Center found that most students who committed attacks in educational institutions over the past decade had experienced severe bullying and had presented both disciplinary and behavioral problems that were never reported.

“A clear backpack will do nothing more than increase the risk of another tragedy. The root of a vast majority of school shootings is bullying. Exposing the personal items of students will increase instances of  bullying  and will inevitably elevate the risk of a school shooter.”

The Achilles heel of the transparent backpack and any other restrictive measures, such as metal detectors at entrances or cyber-surveillance, is that these measures focus on controlling rather than fixing.

The real problem is not the objects that the students carry into school or the social networks to which they subscribe but the lack of an educational strategy that results in the necessary behaviors so that students do not have the compulsion to assault or the fear of being attacked. What is needed are strategies so that students learn to manage stress in adverse situations and that they have the tools to resolve conflicts without feeling the need to attack. Such measures can do much more to achieve school safety than any control and surveillance of students.

Strategies that educate beyond just monitoring

Observing and restricting based on what is seen is a straightforward and visible strategy, the kind that is implemented when one wants to show that something is being done to prevent a violent incident from happening again in schools. However, is this directed to the roots of the problems that provoked the violent incidents in the first place?

Dr. Susan Rivers, co-founder and deputy director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale, explains the implications of various approaches to maintaining peace in schools. “There are effective and not-so-effective ways to deal with bullying,” Rivers says. She elaborates by citing reactive strategies that have no depth, such as reporting incidents, telling students to stop, or implementing legal protocols. For Dr. Rivers, these options are a coin tossed in the air; they can work if the problem is not severe, but if it is a frequent and chronic situation, these solutions can be useless or even counterproductive and destructive.

A better path, Rivers argues, begins by deciphering why children commit school bullying. In this context, most of the time, students resort to this type of abuse when they have not learned to regulate their emotions effectively or to create and maintain relationships based on mutual support. When they lack that security and “emotional floor,” they may become overwhelmed with negative emotions that direct their actions, leading to violent incidents in the
schools.

Some programs start from strategies based on the development of emotional intelligence and empathy and use effective communication to correct the imbalances of power in peer relationships; they offer students accompaniment through problems such as depression, anxiety, and stress.

For both teachers and parents, the problem of safety in schools will always be a priority. Still, to get results that endure, one must understand that no matter how many surveillance and control measures are applied, it is impossible to see students (and what they do) all the time. What is more important and necessary is to give them the tools and skills that enable them to trust that they will be safe in a school environment in which everyone will use the mechanisms that generate a non-violent experience.

Sofía García-Bullé

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0