Death or Detention? The Fight for Safer Schools Continues

 

Due to recent events in the United States of America, the safety of students all around the world is the first priority on everyone’s mind. It is evident that people are fed up and they’re not stopping this time. March For Our Lives is the biggest piece of evidence in the fact that generation Z will not go down without a fight for change. People die in silence, movements die in silence, we will not be silent. No group of students shows this more than the survivors of the Stoneman Douglas school shooting in Parkland, Florida. They continue to fight months after the tragic shooting that took 17 of their fellow peers’ lives, hoping to pay homage to the victims and make sure they did not die in vain.

With Spring break coming to an end, the Broward School District, which includes Marjory Stoneman Douglas, has adopted new safety measures, with one such measure being making clear backpacks mandatory. These backpacks are going to be provided to the students free of charge, and are the only backpacks allowed on campus.

This is a clear violation of privacy, a point that students of the Parkland school have made sure rings clear. Junior Kyrah Simon told The Sun Sentinel “I think it’s the illusion of security, and it’s not going to accomplish anything, except make students feel like their privacy is being violated,” a quote later utilized in “The New York Times” article “Clear Bags Among Security Measures at School Where 17 Died.”

In the article “How Parkland Students Feel About Their New Mandatory Clear Backpacks” by CNN, a student from Douglas High School said, “ My school was a place where everyone felt comfortable, it was a home away from home, and now that home has been destroyed.” Clear backpacks is the equivalent to putting a bandaid on a broken leg. Two wrongs do not make a right, and clear backpacks is not the solution to the safety issue in our schools.

There are so many better ways to go about increasing safety measures that does not strip the students of their sense of privacy and comfort in the building. The school has already taken a huge amount of precautions since the shooting such as an increase in school safety officers, motoring doors and gates, and soon to be enacted metal-detector scanning. With all these measures, clear backpacks seems like an over exaggerated precaution out of fear of the possibility this tragedy occurs again.

Aneesa Asgarali

My name is Aneesa Asgarali and I write for the general news section of the paper. I love art and music and I spend most of my free time exploring the city with friends. I enjoy journalism because I have a passion for writing and I’m excited to portray that in my articles.