Aug 19, 2018 3 min read

Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., have been making their way across the country this summer and continuing their call for stricter gun control laws in the wake of the massacre at their school last February that left 17 students and faculty dead and 17 others injured. Their efforts may yet bear fruit in the long run. As Martin Luther King Jr. once observed, “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”

In the near-term, though, it’s hard not to feel a sense of exhaustion and dismay as lawmakers plug their ears to any calls for sensible gun reforms, and schools are left to add yet more layers of security to try to keep students, faculty and staff safe. The days when schools functioned as de facto community centers where people could come and go as they pleased are now long in the rear-view mirror.

Take, for instance, the news that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security plans on doling out grant money for a program that would teach high school students bleeding-control techniques. Even though the department suggests the program could be useful for students who are caught in natural disasters, the need to teach students how to stop bleeding through the use of “their hands, dressings and tourniquets” is clearly a response to the spate of school shootings that have taken the lives of more than 250 students and teachers since the turn of the century.

During the time that students have been out of classrooms this summer, school districts in Washington and Greene counties have perhaps inevitably been beefing up their security to try to assure that the horrors that befell students in Parkland, Newtown, Conn., and Columbine, Colo., do not happen here. As Karen Mansfield reports in today’s edition of the Observer-Reporter, school districts have been busy since June hiring additional resource officers, police and social workers, and installing metal detectors, shatter-resistant glass, safety doors and other features. The Trinity Area School District is bringing a security dog on board. Some of the money to pay for all this is coming from the 2018-19 Pennsylvania budget, which included $60 million for school security and safety. This is a 700 percent increase over the previous year’s budget.

Fred Morecraft, the superintendent of Carmichaels Area School District, told Mansfield, “We are constantly assessing what we can do to make our schools safe. I think we have a pretty good plan in place. I hope we never have to use it.”

Another superintendent, Joseph Orr of the Jefferson-Morgan School District, said, “I think one of the most important pieces we’ve found is the ability for kids to buy into the idea that we’re all in this together.”

That officials have given over so much time to thinking about security is both commendable and unfortunate. The buildings they oversee are becoming increasingly fortress-like. But it is not their fault; instead, it’s the unfortunate byproduct of the times we are in and the world in which we live.