Letter: Little Compton considering million dollar school officer

Posted 2/20/19

To the editor:



We are lucky to have a small community school in Little Compton; schools are the center of a good and thoughtful society.  I was extremely surprised to read in the school …

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Letter: Little Compton considering million dollar school officer

Posted

To the editor:



We are lucky to have a small community school in Little Compton; schools are the center of a good and thoughtful society.  I was extremely surprised to read in the school news bulletin that the LC School Committee has invested a great deal of time and energy into the topic of a School Resource Officer (armed police officer). The use of an SRO in an elementary school is almost unheard of.

My first concern was why was this issue coming up in Little Compton's school?  I wondered if I do not know my town.   Perhaps there are untold stories of violence in our schools.  Perhaps fear consultants are pushing an SRO as a solution, with the aim to calm the fear and anxiety that we have developed as a nation.

There is an entire industry that sells fear to public schools and taxpayers. Our governor and lawmakers have succumbed. They have offered up money and even proposed laws to require putting cops in every school.  Should we be walling off schools from the community as if our town was a war zone?

 At last week’s school committee meeting, it was abundantly clear that fear is driving this issue.  The school superintendent, Dr. Dias-Mitchell, stated several times that she was concerned about 'strangers' using the basketball court or tennis court during school hours.  Dr. Dias-Mitchell noted that while there are no serious issues in the school, something might happen. Dr. Dias-Mitchell even suggested that school absentee rates might be reduced if there was a cop in the school — the open playground, recreational field, tennis court, and basketball courts.  The school committee appeared to have entered these discussions in a very thoughtful deliberate manner. 

The budget was presented in a manner that made a school cop seem cheap but when you play that cost out over a decade it is very expensive at a cost of nearly $1 million over ten years.

This decision will cost our small town a lot.  The cost to the budget is one concern but a larger concern should be the cost to our children.  We have conditioned children to believe that they are likely to be killed while in school. School shootings are ultra-rare but extremely tragic events that are highly publicized. It appears that these events have convinced some to spend large sums of education dollars on 'safety'. 

This conditions our kids to think violence is normal.  The adults are bringing an untold amount of extra anxiety to children with their drills, their armed police officers, their extra layer of ‘safety measures’.  There is little evidence that putting a cop in a school could prevent a massacre.  Active Shooter Training gravely damages the innocence of childhood but does little to save lives. 

How many educational resources could be bought with the money wasted on a false sense of safety and a heavy dose of anxiety?

Andrew L. Rhyne, Ph.D.

Little Compton

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