School Safety

On a daily basis, schools and school districts face a multitude of challenges in keeping weapons, drugs and any other harmful individuals or items out of their buildings.

Most school buildings have a small handful of individuals that deal with safety and preventing items from coming in. It is visually obvious very few schools have enough resources and staff to handle the high need of safety in a school.

I often ask myself, why are school districts so reactive when it comes to safety? Why don't they provide schools with the resources to scan every student, provide doors with alarms on them, airport style bag scanners, or with enough video cameras to monitor school activity?

The fact is without a safe environment no learning can occur. Staff and students will be to concerned with their safety then with teaching and learning.

I challenge all school districts to make sure they provide enough resources to make sure that incidents of violence that involve weapons, do not occur. I challenge school districts to become "Proactive" rather then waiting for an incident to occur.

Another critical element involved in creating a safe school environment is having enough counseling and wellness resources available to students. Counselors need to have manageable size case loads so that they can know students more intimately and hopefully prevent incidents from occurring since they are better informed.

The last and most vital element is parent/guardian-student relationships. We need our parents of our students to talk, listen and respond to their children. We all remember as a child we needed someone we could talk to if we had an issue, or even if we didn't. We all need someone to vent or celebrate with, but we often get caught up in our own lives to take time to listen to our children who need us the most. We also have to encourage our students the importance of telling an adult when another child may be upset, and may cause harm to him or herself or another individual.

I know you have heard it before but I cannot emphasize it enough!
"It takes a village to raise a child!"


Living the Dream!
Mr. Anibal Soler, Jr.
www.anibalsoler.com