Imagine you wake up in a good mood and are looking forward to a productive day of learning at school. Right as you pull up, you notice there is a long line of students waiting to enter the school. Just as Thanksgiving break ended, the staff at Darnell Cookman School of the Medical Arts (DC SoMA) implemented an irritating new rule.
Starting on the second day of December, students are required to go through a mini-security checkpoint before entering DC SoMA’s campus and proceeding to class. This process involves each student taking out his or her laptop, placing it on the desk, taking out all contents from their backpacks, removing all binders and materials, and placing them on the desk. After removing all contents from backpacks, pockets, and glass cases, each person wishing to enter the school walks through the metal detector. Once done with removing all items and walking through the metal detector, each person then picks up everything and heads to his or her destination. This process can become so time-consuming that on the day of implementation, staff finished letting in students at 8:30, leaving the students who arrived early in the cold for 50+ minutes.
I wondered why I, along with many others, were left shivering in the cold and how this security checking process could be done more efficiently. I also wondered why DC’s staff felt the need to start a “bag check.” My major questions were: why did they start the checks, and why did they start them now when we were almost done with half of the school year? But when I asked other students, I quickly realized that their bitterness from being left in the cold stained their answers; they had already frozen all morning, so I decided to ask again later.
From the answers I got, their initial thoughts weren’t even pointed towards the question. Rather, they were more interested in knowing whether these checks would result in a student population becoming sick from being out in the cold for far too long. These responses piqued my interest, so in the first period, while the topic was still on my mind, I researched the conditions for one to get hypothermia. It was a body temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit (F), which typically occurs in 40 degrees F weather. Although we weren’t as close as we thought to freezing (it was 50 degrees F), it was still rude and inconsiderate for students to be punished so harshly for arriving early.
Later, when asking high schoolers what they thought the checks were for, their responses mostly sounded like “I don’t know why, but I do know it’s stupid,” “probably to copy Stanton,” and “they want another way to make our lives worse.” The middle schoolers (trying to sound cool) responded with a flurry of “I don’t know” and shoulder shrugs. However, one person stood out saying “you could never be too safe in this country,” and my information tells me that his answer was correct.
School has never felt safe in the last couple of years. Ever since school shootings began to increase in 2015, all counties around the country have implemented procedures in efforts to keep students, staff, and all people on school campuses safe. While I understood the need for safety checks, I still was curious as to why safety checks weren’t started at the beginning of the year, but rather, close to the end of the first half of the school year. Like so many others, the question remained: “If they’re being so preventive, why did they start this month?”
And to that, I’d say studies from various organizations show that during the winter months, emotions tend to run higher, making it more likely that those scary events would happen, which increases risks to student and staff safety during these winter months.
In conclusion, it really sucks that we now are forced to go through the embarrassing process of taking everything out of our bag and walking through a metal detector every day as we go to school and during the winter months, enduring cold weather that might make us sick or prone to catching colds. However, quite simply, the alternative would be a great risk, putting you, your friends, and your teachers in danger. Thus, being embarrassed or catching a cold seems well worth it to remain safe when going to school to learn.
