On the again of a door in a house in Flint, Mich., there hangs a black Trailmaker backpack that belongs to Jaxon Williams, a 3rd grader at Freeman Elementary. It hasn’t been moved for practically every week.
“It’s officially retired, like a jersey,” mentioned his mom, Ladel Lewis, a City Council member.
That’s as a result of Jaxon and over 2,800 different college students throughout 11 campuses within the Flint Community Schools are topic to a ban on backpacks that started this week after district officers have been alarmed by threats to college students’ security. It will stay in impact not less than till the tip of the college yr in mid-June.
After the primary week below the ban, Dr. Lewis and different dad and mom within the district expressed frustration and skepticism, saying that decided college students would carry weapons below their clothes. Some consultants additionally query the effectiveness of such bans.
The ban, which permits luggage the dimensions of small purses, got here lower than two weeks after a safety menace led to the closing of a highschool within the district for 2 days. At a particular assembly of the Flint Board of Education, educators voiced their rising issues about faculty security after a sequence of college shootings across the nation, together with one in Oxford, Mich., a group about 30 miles outdoors Flint, the place a pupil shot and killed 4 classmates at a highschool in 2021.
Younger kids have additionally been bringing weapons to high school. In January, a 6-year-old first grader in Newport News, Va., shot his trainer with a handgun.
“In my 15 years of service here in Flint Community Schools, I’ve never felt the way I do now,” Ernest Steward, the district’s director of pupil providers, mentioned on the assembly.
Mr. Steward’s security issues are legitimate, mentioned Justin Heinze, an academic psychologist on the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health who focuses on faculty violence prevention.
“It’s pretty much undeniable that the number of shootings and the severity of shootings are going up” in colleges, Dr. Heinze mentioned.
A 2022 report from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics recorded a complete of 93 faculty shootings throughout the 2020-21 faculty yr, the best since 2000-01.
About 3 % of scholars in kindergarten via twelfth grade will carry a weapon to high school in a given yr, Dr. Heinze mentioned.
At the April 25 board assembly, Mr. Steward beneficial eliminating backpacks for not less than the remainder of the tutorial yr.
The menace to the highschool was “just one incident of ongoing issues we’ve had this year around students bringing weapons into our buildings in backpacks,” he mentioned. He added that the district had banned backpacks prior to now.
As surging gun violence continues to devastate American school rooms and the president himself declared that he was powerless to forestall it, a patchwork of straightforward measures, together with insurance policies requiring clear backpacks or banning them altogether, have taken on heightened significance.
Backpack bans have been rolled out in different communities lately, together with one put in place this week at an elementary faculty in Ocala, Fla., after a pupil introduced in a toy gun that regarded actual, a spokesman for the district mentioned.
In an April 27 letter saying the brand new coverage, Kevelin Jones, the superintendent in Flint, wrote that “backpacks make it easier for students to hide weapons, which can be disassembled and harder to identify or hidden” however that “clear backpacks do not completely fix this issue.”
“By banning backpacks altogether and adding an increased security presence across the district, we can better control what is being brought into our buildings,” he wrote.
Dr. Heinze mentioned there was not a lot proof to help both banning backpacks or mandating clear ones, noting that solely a handful of research prior to now 20 years had regarded on the challenge in depth.
Dr. Lewis questioned why the ban was essential for elementary faculty college students. She mentioned she had stopped sending Jaxon to high school with a pocket book, a folder and a change of garments for his after-school actions.
Chloe Combs, an eighth grader at Holmes STEM Academy in Flint, has been bringing her lunch to high school day by day since kindergarten, mentioned her mom, Sherese Combs. On Monday, Chloe, 14, switched from a backpack with loads of room for a lunch bag and a water bottle to a miniature backpack, the dimensions of a small purse, that may solely match a smaller lunch container. She’s not capable of carry fairly as a lot meals, Ms. Combs mentioned, “but she manages.”
Ms. Combs pressured that oldsters ought to do extra to make sure that their kids weren’t bringing weapons to high school. She expressed disappointment over a violent conflict between two dad and mom throughout pupil pickup at a close-by constitution faculty, during which the state police mentioned one lady had shot one other.
“The only time I’m comfortable is when she gets home from school,” Ms. Combs mentioned about Chloe. “It’s just very stressful.”
Source: www.nytimes.com