With SC school violence on the rise, advocacy group releases wide-ranging safety agenda
In response to an increase in violent incidents in schools locally and across the nation, a coalition of advocacy associations focused on the well-being of children is urging policy makers at the federal, state and local levels to adopt a 10-point school safety agenda.
The group, South Carolina Coalition for Safer Schools, discussed its recommendations at a news conference Friday at the Palmetto State Teachers Association headquarters in West Columbia.
“But for the grace of God we have not had a Columbine, Parkland, Uvalde-scale tragedy here in South Carolina,” said Patrick Kelly, a 12th grade teacher at Blythewood High School who serves as PSTA’s director of governmental affairs. “And we are trying desperately to get in front of that.”
School shootings are on the rise nationally, according to a report released earlier this year by the National Center for Education Statistics, which found at least 93 such incidents with casualties during the 2020-2021 school year, the highest number reported in two decades.
South Carolina last year experienced its most school shootings in 47 years, according to the Charleston Post and Courier, and the number of weapons confiscated in schools more than doubled between 2018 and 2021 in districts the paper analyzed.
“What should be one of the safest places in our community no longer feels or has that sense of security that I once felt as a kid,” said Deion Jameson, South Carolina’s 2023 Teacher of the Year, who on Friday relayed the frightening time an intruder breached his Greenville charter school.
Kelly said he was crestfallen earlier this year when his 14-year-old daughter told him she no longer felt safe at school in the aftermath of the Uvalde, Texas massacre.
“It broke my heart as a parent and it broke my heart as an educator,” he said. “Because no child should feel that way. And I don’t think my daughter’s the exception. She’s become the rule.”
Kelly, who was joined Friday by representatives from the Institute for Child Success, South Carolina Counseling Association, South Carolina Association of School Psychologists and South Carolina chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the coalitional nature of the group is essential to addressing the multi-faceted problem of school violence.
The group’s agenda, which focuses on in-school and out-of-school factors, is not a panacea for eliminating school violence, its members said, but should provide common sense policy solutions that are “practical, possible and hold great promise to keep children safe.”
Its in-school recommendations include enhancing student mental health services and addressing the state’s shortage of school resource officers — both priorities of the governor — making physical school security upgrades, training staff to identify and address bullying, and adopting mandatory, uniform policies related to school threat assessments and procedures.
In a recent example of the difficulty some districts have had finding school resources officers — approximately 300 of the 1,200-plus schools in the state did not have a full-time SRO last year — the Lexington-Richland 5 school board this past week voted to allow three members of the school district’s security team to carry weapons on campus.
The SC Coalition for Safer Schools also supports safety measures that extend beyond school walls and require legislative action, such as the establishment of a statewide school safety center and tip line, and the creation of community-based violence intervention programs.
Other legislative recommendations include passing child access prevention laws that impose legal responsibility for adults who provide minors access to firearms and cracking down on the growing problem of firearm theft in the state. On the federal level, the group proposes social media age restrictions and requirements that social media companies act on threats of violence made on their platforms.
Some recommendations will be harder to achieve than others, Kelly acknowledged, but the coalition’s aim is to prioritize the policies it believes will have the greatest potential impact and the broadest base of support.
For that reason, ideas like installing metal detectors at schools or arming teachers, while popular in some circles, are not among the group’s proposals.
“The need is too urgent to retreat … into partisan talking points and not get anything done,” Kelly said. “We’ve got to get stuff done and we believe these are the 10 areas where there’s the most consensus to move forward.”
The group hopes by publicizing its school safety agenda it can jump-start a conversation about the issue heading into next year’s legislative session and ensure state lawmakers prioritize matters of school safety.
“Maybe we can’t do all 10 of these in one legislative session,” Kelly said. “But more than anything we want to see them come out of the gate in January with this at the very top of their priority list on education and child-related policies.”
The recommendations with the best chance of legislative adoption include those related to student mental health, addressing the dramatic increase in firearm theft and enhancing security at school facilities through capital improvements, especially in rural areas, he said.
This story was originally published August 27, 2022 at 5:00 AM.