Meranda Watling, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, brings us an article highlighting our collective fear for our children’s safety in and around school.
Safety and security in and around schools continue to grow tighter in response to tragedies and threats that weren’t as prevalent a decade ago. Schools require visitor sign-ins and badges, outfit students and staff with IDs and have officers walk the halls on a regular basis.
. . .
“The necessity for this is a sign of the times,” Francis said. “Since Columbine, it has increased every year. Our purpose is to try and do everything we can reasonably do” to protect students.
“Tragedies and threats that weren’t as prevalent a decade ago.” “Sign of the times” — It’s in the newspaper, so I guess it has to be true, but still I wonder. Are tragedies and threats really all that much more prevalent than in the hallowed days of yore? Certainly our perception of risk is greater than it was; but I have my doubts whether the risk is actually any greater. And, yet, statements asserting the increased risk probably aren’t even fact-checked. They’re taken for granted.
I tend to agree with the statement of Ian Green, quoted in the article:
For parent Ian Green, like his daughter, he said he feels safe and thinks schools do enough. He’d rather children not feel needlessly concerned all the time by unnecessary measures.
“If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. Nothing will stop it,” Green said. “But how far do you want to go?”
For my part, I get a little irritated with this unstated idea that humanity is progressively deteriorating from some mythic state of grace. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. With respect to safety in schools, there has to be some balance. Yes, we want our kids to be very safe. But, we don’t want our kids growing up in a miniature police state, becoming accustomed to subject themselves to the will of the government in the absence of a specific need.
Yes, we want our kids to be safe at school,expect them to be safe during school, yet see no problem with sending them to school in the dark.
Why not start school 45 minutes later, and then we wouldn’t have to worry about the darkness? We could have year-round central daylight time. And then, just for the wellbeing of the children, start school at 7:45 or 8:00. School could then go until 4, and we wouldn’t have to have the kids come home to two hours of an empty house. Problem solved.
Right on, T! “Won’t someone think of the children??? We need year-round CDT NOW! If you vote against year-round CDT, you hate children! You would rather play golf late than protect some child from being killed!”
Wow, it IS a great hammer!
Yeah, but it only works if you delay school starting times. Otherwise, they are in the dreaded darkness. I just never know why they have to start so early and end so early. Maybe there’s a teacher around this place to tell us why they have to start when they do?
I feel like I’ve been summoned. I have a couple of theories, non of them validated and I’ve been out of the system for a few years. One, I think the early time was set so that parents had time to get their kids dressed, fed, and on the bus or dropped off at school before they had to be at their own job. A lot of people report to work at 8 AM.
Another theory is that once upon a time, kids needed to get home and get to work in the fields, so they started early so the kids would have more daylight to work.
Could be that it’s just an age-old institution and people just don’t want to change it. “I had to get up at the crack of dawn to go to school! My kids will too!”
As a teacher, I liked starting early and ending early, but that’s entirely selfish and not a very good reason for keeping it as it is.
However, there are enough problems with schools today on my list that I’d put start and end times near the bottom on things that need fixing.
Those are the two reasons I had always heard I guess.
Some people have to be at work at 7:00 a.m. Plus I think that there are so many after-school activities and teachers’ meetings that it might be hard to adjust the school day. Hard, but not impossible.
Some go into work at midnight, too. But most probably go to work at 8 and come home at 5. Meaning of course that they might have to leave the house at 7:30 to get to work on time. Unless they work in Eastern time, in which case they have to leave before their kids anyway.
It’s an interesting question: Is it worth having 4:40 sunsets every winter throughout a 45 year career in order to avoid 12 years of the inconvenience of having junior not head to school until 7:40 in the morning?
T: No offense, but I doubt that “most” people go to work at 8 and leave at 5, especially in non-metro areas where office jobs with regular hours are hard to come by. Shift workers at factories, hospital and nursing home personnel, teachers and others who work in public schools, police, firemen, anyone who works in retail, farmers, and people in lots of other jobs work all kinds of crazy hours. Day shift starts earlier than 8 a.m. at lots of employers. I’ve a feeling that your work day starts very early and ends very late, also. :)
Anyway, I don’t really disagree with you about starting school later. I do think it would be virtually impossible to tailor the school day to the working hours of parents, however, since those hours vary so much.
I like your idea about having Indiana on year-round CDT. Same thing as year-round EST, only the DST lovers might actually buy into it.
Pila, we had that and now the pro-DST types think that people who want year-round CDT are just unable to change their clocks. In my opinion they are not looking at the “big” pcture. Central time would best serve 87 out of the 92 Indiana counties. You heard it here first it will eventually be that way.
My experience as a teacher for 35 years was that any time there was discussion of extending the academic day,then there were immediate concerns about sports and other after school propgrams.Also we had meetings regually before school officially started,,and so did student groups. My high school was typical, I would judge ,in that on any given afternoon/night many things were going on.Sections of the building school remained open til about 9 pm on many evenings.The issue was never actually darkness in morning or night but the actual clock time..After we lengtened our school day I started classroom teaching at 7:30 and taught til 3pm. But the school day begins before that and extends after that.One example,Someone had to supervise kids in halls starting before 6:30 am.If minors are present then so must be adult supervision is the rule of thumb.
I taught in Illinois CST/CDT TZ and we expected both mornings and afternoons to be dark and cold on winter days.All during the TZ debate I thought way too much was made of morning darkness and afternoon darkness.It’s the actual time of day that causes scheduling conflicts.Everything goes indoors in Winter anyway,and the issue is can we fit everything in? Arriving and leaving school was never an issue,expect as to how to fit everything in.
I would say that having to deal with 2 TZs,on top of everything else, would have been quite a problem ,as it is now in certain parts of Indiana.
Lou, I like your point about morning darkness, except you erxpect it in the winter months not in September. On my way to work this morning at 6:30 EDST I had to stop for three buses picking-up students on busy roads in the DARK. Winter darkness is one thing but fall darkness is another. This point is really strange when you figure right next door to the west is a school system that runs on Central time and at the moment this students are getting on the buss the CDST students are probably just getting out of bed.
Hey, I understand you, Lou. I don’t agree with you about DST, but it would be difficult to change the school day. Nice if it could be done, but very difficult and very unlikely to happey. I used to be a substitute teacher, and was amazed at all the activities and meetings that took place before and after school.
Larry: and technically, it isn’t even fall yet. I know that some people love frolicking in the 10 p.m. sun in June and July (not me!), but dark mornings in August and September make no sense to me.