Since the dawn of the new year, two Montgomery County high schools have faced multiple safety concerns, adding fuel to recent conversations about students’ security in schools and the quality of their education, given these repetitive disruptions to school hours.
In the waning days of February, Bethesda-Chevy Chase (B-CC) High School faced back-to-back lockdowns for two separate incidents involving weapons near and on campus, respectively. In January, John F. Kennedy High School weathered their own back-to-back shelter-in-place and lockdown. These incidents, so early into the year, have breathed fresh life into concerns surrounding school safety and class disruption. More and more often, incidents like these sow anxiety in communities and detract from instruction time by prioritizing safety drills or weapons sweeps, keeping students physically out of the building and removed from any instructional materials.
Furthermore, county and school officials seem to be at times unresponsive to concerns from parents and students who wish to see more concrete action, or at the very least an action plan. At a community meeting held at B-CC in response to the lockdown incidents, several attendees noted the absence of school leadership as a symptom distinctive of the county’s failure on multiple levels to respond quickly and appropriately in the face of what many consider to be existential threats to students’ educations and lives.
The county has attempted to defend their actions, claiming they have done their best with the limited information they had to work with at the time. MCPS Superintendent Thomas Taylor noted that these decisions seem more straightforward and sensical with the benefit of hindsight, stressing that his office’s moves at the time were the best they could offer given the circumstances.
Nonetheless, members of the B-CC community and the neighborhoods surrounding the school hold that they have not seen enough communication or proactivity on the part of officials. While it is not fair to expect MCPS to stop dangerous off-campus incidents before they happen, there should be preventative measures available to reassure communities of the county’s commitment to safety and desire to improve.
Firstly, additional security staff are needed in all schools in MCPS. Compared to wildly unrealistic measures such as weapons detectors, hiring more staff is less constricting on the budget and easier to adapt to. At this point in time, it does not make sense not to have security staff specifically tasked to elementary schools, and given the large populations of most high schools, security teams in those places should be buffered for maximum presence and coverage.
Secondly, to assure communities of the county’s commitment to communication, frequent safety inspections and drills should be conducted at schools and all appropriate information should be released for the public to see. The best way to build confidence in the school system’s ability to keep students safe is to allow parents and caregivers to see the proof themselves, encouraging transparency.
Lastly, student policies that may contribute to dangerous decisions must be prevented if possible. While restricting student freedoms is never popular, revising the Student Code of Conduct to be harsher and more legalistic could help limit the extent to which students make poor choices. Luckily, the MCPS Chief of Schools, Peter Moran, has said that the county is actively in the process of revising the Student Code of Conduct to be just that.
Last November, three MCPS Board of Education incumbents were unseated due to a near county-wide consensus that MCPS had failed at communication, failed at timely action, and failed to listen to the concerns of county stakeholders. School safety may be the most recent driver of county policy change, and county officials, especially the Board, should be listening carefully to the voices of those who elected them. There is no more time to be making the same mistakes.
