School Safety

As long as we are encouraging safety precautions for our school kids (weapons in schools) why don’t we also work more aggressively on confronting the illegal and dangerous drugs in our schools that are tempting our immature, curious and vulnerable children? Addiction is like playing Russian Roulette, yet the highly addictive drugs that have plagued our schools for decades does not seem to end. When a person with a gun comes into our buildings and multiple tragedies result, we become concerned as we should and want to eliminate that from ever happening again. Yet, the tragedies that result when naïve, curious and vulnerable teenagers (one at a time) succumb to peer pressure and experiments with drugs, this hardly becomes newsworthy as the administration tries to protect that problem for fear of damaging the image of our schools and/or our families. Much more effort on this problem is put forth protecting the problem for "pride's" sake, than protecting our children. I know this first hand and I will believe the boe and the administrators will take this problem seriously when I see this concern listed on a principal/faculty meeting or a boe meeting agenda. Maybe this is spoken about more freely now, but my 27 year experience of working in the main office of EHS, did not witness any open, honest conversation about this, and it was handled with such confidentiality and discretion, it seemed to me the adult staff was in denial about the availability of drugs and the poor families who bore the tragedies. No wonder the families tried to keep it from public consumption when the stigma was so perpetuated by the school employees for fear of political fall-out. Education and educators should know better than to be this shallow. A problem like this does not have the luxury of playing politics to avoid confrontation. When we are working with young people, we need to have the courage to tell it like it is and if we See Something, Say Something! Let’s try and address this problem in the new school year with more honesty and success. But first we have to admit it and talk openly about it.