Metal Detectors: Justifying School Safety Essay

How a good deal is your childs safety worth? Are you willing to put a price furrow on your childs life? Many cropings atomic number 18 move a price tag, unless fortunately several be non. A shocking one in ten educatees has carried a weapon to trail day in New York. Statistics like this cannot be music to the ears of pargonnts. You maintain to venerate what aims be doing about this awful matter. A notion that has been around, yet a new persuasion is helping pave the future on student safety in schools. It is admixturelic element demodulators. This new idea has ca recitationd controversy all told over the world. Schools around the United States have turned to metal detectors for their solution. I feel that metal detectors ar a small price to tolerate when this matter concerns children. Metal detectors are helpful and expensive. However, most schools are suitable to afford them, and they do not exploit students offices.Metal detectors ensure school safety quick ly and effectively. They help employ a practice that is seen in many disciplines, including airports and courthouses. Many may argue that they consume too much fourth dimension and require specially trained professionals. On the contrary, several schools have taken the homogeneous invoices that are taken when conducting a poll. Polls altogether use a small percent of the population for the actual questions, but it still represents the entire population. Countless cities, including New York, have set a predetermined method of scanning which allows them to scan every second or third student instead of the entire student body (McDermott 2). This measure is closely monitored, and it has proven to be successful. Some schools have even make things move quicker by having the teachers enter through a disparate entrance, which in any case includes metal detectors. Metal detectors in schools are also enforcing a method that is comm single used everywhere these days. A student from g elt states in a message board that,Government offices have metal detectors that everyone has to walk through before they enter. If I go to City Hall, I have to walk through a metal detector. If I go to court for a speeding ticket, I have to go through a metal detector. Why shouldnt kids have to do the same in school? Its a open place, funded by public dollars (much like government offices) and Idont see that it violates anyones civil rights to have to walk through a metal detector to ensure that a school is safe.Students lose many privileges when they enter the school doors because student safety is on the top of the list. If they do not requisite to be searched or questioned past they should not bring with them articles that are distant for school.Leigh was right when he said metal detectors are expensive. They can dress from $4,495 to $5,495 for the walk-through models and from one hundred to four hundred dollars for the hand-held models. This tiddler setback causes debates. Metal detectors may not be needed in all grades of schools. A vast majority of school homicides and suicides 179 took place in high schools when surveyed in New York. Therefore, various school districts may altogether need to install the metal detectors in high schools. Another construction is that revenue enhancementpayers already pay for insufficient funds. They should use the money for safer schools, instead of reenforcement a new, state-of-the-art prison. Public officials need to look into where other tax dollars are going, and try and focus on getting it to go to schools.Students go to school to be educated if their education is impaired the school officials then need to step in. Students are also missing valuable time when public officials are required to search the entire school because of threats of a bomb or other life threatening incidents. All the kids are missing out on their education (Szaniszlo 1). This could have been impedeed with the metal detectors. Altho ugh the threats are to be taken seriously, the officials would have a sense of relief with the metal detectors in place. Metal detectors are beneficial to everyone, and not just the students. For example, they enforce school policy and protect students. The school officials have a right to search with reasonable cause and this does not invade the students rights or privacy. The school officials are in loco parentis (in the place of the parent) to help maintain evidence in the school. Rules and regulations create a structure that is necessary to ensure a safe environment, . . . that will reinforce the Districts priority inclination of safe schools for all students and staff (Code of Conduct).Just asstudents must follow the rules, school officials have a set of rules to follow. Also, parents are allowed to search their kids inhabit without a search warrant mandatory, so school officials should be given over the same standard. They are acting in loco parentis therefore, like paren ts they do not need a search warrant. The in loco parentis article of faith basically assumes that students have no legitimate expectation of privacy in their personal property, much(prenominal) as purses, gym bags, or clothing (Persico 28). The school is now not only responsible for educating the children, but also for defend them while in the schools supervision. School officials were not permitted to lead astray a pat-down search until the scanning device had been activated twice (NYSSN). They are obligated to search when they feel the school environment has been threatened.School officials only begin a thorough search when the detector has beeped twice on the same student. Only then are they allowed to search the specific area where it beeped. Leigh states that metal detectors instill a sense of humiliation in students (654). Students would not be embarrassed if the search was done in private. He also mentions the most harmful effect of metal detectors is their psychological impact on students subjected to daily searches (Leigh 653). I have to agree that it might cause such impact, but that it is worth the price. When a student dies on school thousand it also causes a sense of fear for classmates. Schools only have these powers because they are out to ensure our safety. Schools will use whatever means mathematical to protect he student body.The Columbine tragedy really alter the American public. Who knew that two teenage boys would have access to guns and that they would intentionally use them to hurt others? Schools with the help of metal detectors would have a chance to prevent such incidents in the future. Metal detectors may not be a full-proof plan, but they would be valuable asset for schools. School districts are crook to this new phenomenon to better the school environment and community. Trying to work around the metal detectors idea or complaining about the cost are not the real issues. The students life is at stake. Nevertheless, to preve nt the impossible from happening, adopting the idea of metal detectors is worth taking a chance.