Opinion

School Safety: Helpful or Just Stressful?

By: Amanda Miranda
Contributors: Rachel Losh, Madeline Young and Kelley McCrary
Friday, September 5, 2025

Walking into school these days can feel like walking into an airport. Bag checks, locked doors, cameras, as well as cops on campus are overly normalized now. The thing is, not everybody agrees on whether this stuff actually ensures our safety, or if it just makes school feel more stressful on top of school work and extracurriculars.

Take bag checks and metal detectors for instance. Sure, they can prevent someone from sneaking in something threatening, and that’s obviously important. However, standing in those long lines every morning while your backpack gets searched? Honestly it can feel like the school doesn’t trust you. Some schools that use them said they found fewer weapons, but at the same time, students there also said they felt less safe. It’s like the rules themselves are a reminder that something bad could happen at any point in time unexpectedly, and that can be a rough way to start the first period. Also, some students aren’t able to get to school early enough and get stuck in the long lines causing them to be late and get a tardy on their record for something they didn’t have power over.

Cameras are another big thing. They definitely help if there’s a fight or if someone’s accused of something they didn’t actually do. Having proof can clear things up but when there’s cameras in pretty much every corner, it can  feel like being watched 24/7. And now some schools even use tech that scans what students are searching online or writing in emails. That sounds like extra safety on paper, but it’s already backfired in some places. Private info leaked, and some students even got outed just because the system flagged certain words. At that point it doesn’t feel like protection anymore it feels like spying.

Then there’s the cops on campus, the school resource officers (SRO). Some students love having them around, because if something serious ever happens you know there’s someone trained right there. At most schools, SROs actually talk to students and act like mentors, which is cool. But not everyone sees it that way. For a lot of people just seeing the uniform is enough to make them nervous. And research shows that while schools with SROs do see a slight decrease in violence, they also see an astronomical rise in harsh discipline measures like suspensions and arrests(Avil-Acosta, Bushway, Engberg, & Sorensen, “The thin blue line in schools: New evidence on school-based policing across the U.S., July 2023, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management). Sometimes even for little stuff a teacher or counselor could’ve handled. That can make school feel less like a place to learn and more like a courthouse.

And of course, the drills. On one hand yeah, it’s good to practice so we know what to do if something were to ever occur in the future. On the other hand, for the majority of people, the alarms and lockdown procedures just cause more stress. Some kids joke about it and never take them seriously enough which shows how they’ll act if a real threat comes. “You play how you practice” after all. While others literally lose sleep thinking about it, so does it actually make us safer, or just more anxious and unprepared? Hard to say.

So what’s the answer? Security will always matter, no question about that, but schools that focus more on counselors, mental health, and actually building trust with students usually see better results across the board rather than just putting up more cameras and locks. Maybe, if Byrd were to explore other options regarding school security and take into account that students feel safer when they feel adults care more about them than just about enforcing overbarring rules.

At the end of the day, we want to feel protected, sure, but we also want school to still feel like a safe place to learn, socialize, and be ourselves. Maybe, the real answer is balance. Enough protection to keep us safe, but not so much that we forget what school is really meant to be about. Afterall, high school is meant to be a safe haven for higher learning and potential, not a place where students are criminalized for just showing up or feeling the need to worry for their safety constantly.