Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

Our local newspaper featured an article by AP writer Stefanie Dazio outlining the steps taken at a Beverly Hill Junior High School. The article gave me chills. Here are a few paragraphs from her piece describing some of the “safety features” at the Horace Mann, which are in bold print:

Beverly Hills is among 200 U.S. school districts using the Share911 app. The board of education added it and other measures, including armed security officers, following the Parkland shooting.

In the fall, the district will add a central command center that will monitor feeds from all the district’s surveillance cameras and use software to monitor keywords in online search traffic for potential threats.

“Safety in schools is evolving. Technology and software, like in all aspects of the modern world, need to be utilized and used,” said Christopher Hertz, district director of school safety. “We want our kids to feel and be safe. … If we do all this, then our teachers can do what they need to do.”

Wealthier areas have not been immune to violence. Horace Mann parents and teachers stressed that they and students feel safe within the walled campus, and not just because it’s in an exclusive area.

We live in a nation that wants to build a wall, use facial recognition software, expand the use of surveillance cameras, and monitor our social media to “protect us” from incoming migrants, criminals who live among us, and potential criminals who are using our new high tech devices to find information on how best to commit crimes. This will require the expenditure of billions of dollars, money that is no longer available for the personal face-to-face interventions that guidance counselors, social workers, and teachers could provide if we had more robust staffing in schools. But despite the loss of these opportunities Dazio reports that most parents and teachers in Beverly Hills appreciate the school district’s efforts:

“I’m grateful I live in this community that has so much security, and I know they are protected,” Evelyn Lahiji, 42, said as she picked up her sons, Lorenzo Naghdechi, 8, and Leonardo Naghdechi, 9.

Christina Richner, 45, said her 6-year-old son, Julian, and 9-year-old daughter, Olivia, have gone through so many emergency drills that “their reflexes will kick in” during a shooting.

The students are trained to gather in a corner with the classroom’s lights out and blinds drawn in a lockdown, social studies teacher Laura Stark said. Staffers check in via the Share911 app to share information, including if any kids are missing or injured.

The real beneficiaries of this, though, are the companies who sell this equipment, companies who lobby as hard as the major corporations and who benefit whenever a school shooting takes place. Ms. Dazio describes these military-technological businesses that prey on the fears of parents as

a billion-dollar industry where companies manufacture products from “ballistic attack-resistant” doors to smoke cannons. The hardening market, as well as lobbying efforts to get taxpayer dollars to fund upgrades, had stalled in recent years but rekindled after the Parkland shooting.

No matter that these businesses are siphoning those billions from revenue starved schools who often cut teachers to provide these kinds of “hardening” products, no matter that other businesses are springing up to provide staff development to teachers so they can train students to “…gather in a corner with the classroom’s lights out and blinds drawn in a lockdown“, we should capitalize on fear to promote spending. That seems to have worked at the national level… and seems to be working locally as well.