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Safe Schools Act Of 1994: Policy Analysis

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Opinions on how to promote school safety on campus remains a topic of debate among conservatives and liberals. While conservatives may feel that increasing the amount of security such as SROs on campus would deter crime, liberals may view this measure as counterproductive as it can fuel the school-to-prison pipeline.
According to Kupchik (2012), the culture of control within the USA allows its government to branch out to and link programs and agencies that involves itself in reducing crime—which also includes schools. This amount of control stems on the foundation of promoting school safety, thus, justifying the excessive use of security measures on school campus.
IV. Policy Recommendations
According to Congress the Safe Schools Act of 1994,…show more content…
Using the Safe Schools Act of 1994, the Act simply denotes the goal of reducing school violence. Rather than allowing schools to formulate their own rules of reducing violence, the Act should provide guidelines to how much security is needed to accommodate different youth populations in different school districts. Not only should the amount of security be taken into consideration, if schools were to allow SROs to patrol campus grounds, the Act should also mandate schools officials to recruit SROs that have been trained or experienced in juvenile delinquency. Having knowledge in juvenile delinquency is imperative as it allows SROs the skillset to engage with youth to de-escalate misbehaviors in classrooms, rather than escalating to physical entrainment or arrest that will serve as a permanent trauma for…show more content…
With these requirements, school districts can easily target at-risk youth that appears to be prominent in their misbehavior. With many incentives of receiving federal aid to support school safety and other additional funds based on academic performance, many at-risk are often removed and displaced from the educational system.
Dismantling Excessive Use of Security Equipments
To promote a healthy learning environment that potentially increases school funding, the first recommendation for schools is to remove all metal detectors on school campus. Having excessive forms of security measures can only be counter-productive to the results that schools want to see. The purpose of school institutions is to promote a learning environment, not an environment where it has become an evolved form of the prison system. Removing metal detectors in its entirety would allow schools to allocate the existing funds to support school administrators or counselors. The use of metal detectors are not only excessive, but perpetuates the image of the prison industrial
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