89 of 100 DOCUMENTS The Boston Herald April 9, 2000 Sunday ALL EDITIONS OP-ED: FORUM; Quick fixes rule 1 year after school deaths - Columbine taught us nothing BYLINE: By Jack Levin and James Alan Fox SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. 023 LENGTH: 1022 words It has been just about a year since two vengeful students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., opened fire on their classmates and teachers, perpetrating the bloodiest school shooting in American history. In the aftermath of the massacre, Americans were horrified. Across the country, groups of anxious parents, teachers, and psychologists huddled in seminars, conferences and meetings to address the issue of students who seek to get even with a semiautomatic. Only now, 12 months after the fact, do we realize exactly what lessons Americans have learned from the experience of mass murder at Columbine High. Judging by the policies and practices implemented over this period of time, it is sad to say that they have learned absolutely nothing. In many middle and high schools, principals have installed metal detectors, stationed armed police officers at school entrances and fitted doorways and hallways with surveillance cameras (even if they couldn't afford to hire the personnel to monitor them). Other schools have banned knapsacks that could potentially hide a weapon deep within or various items of clothing such as black trench coats that might celebrate evil. School boards instituted zero-tolerance policies, automatically suspending any student caught carrying guns or threatening to blow up their school building. Meanwhile, teachers were handed manuals on violence "warning signs" and were trained in ways to spot troublemakers who had the potential for being the next schoolyard sniper. Even the federal government got into the act by sponsoring an expensive series of televised public service announcements in which students were urged not to kill their classmates. Rather than employ long-term policies and programs that had some chance of working to reduce school violence, politicians, principals and parents proposed easy, short-term politically expedient solutions. School administrators typically took a law enforcement approach that, from the outset, had little if any chance to be effective, but was punitive enough to satisfy public opinion and pacify nervous parents. They spent millions of dollars on security equipment money that could have been used instead to make genuine inroads in the battle against school violence as well as to upgrade the entire educational experience. Even worse, panic-stricken school officials suspended many students for the most trivial of reasons from threatening to hurt Barney the dinosaur to making a gun out of construction paper. Students were summarily expelled without regard to their unique circumstances or criminal history; classes were canceled at the slightest provocation; money was wasted; and common sense was ignored. And one year later, incredibly, virtually all of the conditions that precipitated the massacre in Littleton, not to mention school shootings in Springfield, Ore., Jonesboro, Ark., and Pearl, Miss., remain very much in place. As much as ever, bullying is a daily threat to hundreds of thousands of our youngsters as cliques and intolerance for diversity continue to dominate school culture. Many of our children still attend schools that are far too populous and impersonal, sitting in crowded classrooms where teachers are simply overwhelmed by the numbers of their students. Children are counseled by understaffed and overburdened psychologists, nurses and guidance counselors who are lucky if they recognize the faces of their students, let alone their names and problems. Cities and towns around the nation have begun to punish parents, through fines and even jail terms, when their children are truant from classes. Little attention has been devoted to finding ways of encouraging and attracting bored youngsters to attend school. The back-to-basics movement in public education has deprived many children of the "frills" that had made school halfway tolerable as well as esteem-building. Students lack a sufficient range of extracurricular activities from freshman sports teams to drama and chess clubs, which were often eliminated as a shortsighted cost-cutting measure. Wanting to feel special and belong to something important, students may instead join with other bored teens during the after-school hours, far away from the watchful guidance of adults, to celebrate the hate-filled ideology of Adolf Hitler or the mean-spirited teachings of the occult. The entertainment media from television to video games are as violent as ever, inspiring many alienated youngsters to act on their feelings of anger and resentment. The long-awaited and much heralded V-chip is now available to help parents tune out dangerous programming, but few of them care or know how to use the device. Public opinion as well as criminal justice policy are all too often shaped by collective hysteria in response to extraordinary events like Columbine. For example, many school officials respond to bullying only out of fear that some harassed high school student might decide to kill his classmates, not because it is the right thing to do or that it might improve the quality of life for all of our children. The problem with being scared into addressing an issue is that attention to it remains only so long as the perceived threat persists. After just one year, for many Americans, Columbine seems like ancient history, yesterday's news. They have since moved on to address other seemingly more pressing issues - the skyrocketing price of gasoline, the plight of Elian Gonzalez, the dramatic fluctuations in the stock market - without ever having made effective changes in the conditions under which our children go to school. Regrettably, the legacy of the Columbine tragedy appears to be little more than a long list of quick fixes. Yet, in the midst of hype and hysteria, we never really came close to fixing the fundamental problems that alienate children. Despite the A for effort, the results of Americas campaign against school violence deserves a failing grade. Jack Levin is the Brudnick professor of sociology and James Alan Fox is the Lipman professor of criminal justice, at Northeastern University. LOAD-DATE: April 09, 2000 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH Copyright 2000 Boston Herald Inc. |