Mabila Mathebula
School violence is pervasive in most societies and South Africa is no exception. The Gauteng MEC for Education, Matome Chiloane attributes the rising school violence to parental neglect.
I beg to differ with the honourable MEC! The lack of parental control is not an antecedence to school violence! School violence is not a parental issue but a safety and security management issue.
Regrettably, the MEC applied Sutton’s law to diagnose Gauteng’s 245 high-risk schools for violence. Sutton’s law is a term widely used for training medical students. It means that they should consider the most obvious diagnosis for an ailing patient before moving on to other possibilities.
For the MEC, the obvious diagnosis was parental alienation from their children’s education.
On October 23, 2011, I wrote on sheqafrica.com about school safety: “The 2011 academic year posed many security, health, and safety challenges to Gauteng Department of Basic Education. The roll call of incidents include:
* Parktown school girl injured in a schoolyard during a shootout between criminals and police in nearby Northcliff;
* Florida Glen school girl aged 16 kidnapped, raped and murdered;
* Carter Primary School boy aged five had both legs amputated in Alexander, north of Johannesburg, when a large tree fell on a container type classroom;
* Some learners were prevented from attending school by protesters. Others sneaked into school in casual clothes via back gates; and
* Armed gangs and drug dealers are active in some schools.”
Thirteen years later, we are still experiencing school violence. The above incidents are security challenges and have nothing to do with parenting; we are living in an unsafe world where violence abounds.
We should be looking at a school no longer as a friendly part of the community, but as a physical building that needs to have a security assessment.
On December 14, 2012, a gunman shot and killed 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut; there were 74 shooting incidents at schools in the US, according to some advocacy groups.
In 2014, at a high school in Troutdale, Oregon, two students died, one of whom was the gunman. A security assessment immediately after the shooting noted that students and staff had been trained on how to respond to a shooting and that quick reaction by those inside the high school likely saved lives.
However, according to press reports, the school had multiple buildings with multiple entrances. There were no checkpoints for visitors, and someone could enter the main classroom building from a parking lot and walk, unimpeded, into a common area where students gather.
In the US, the Columbine massacre is used as a benchmark for how people respond to shooting incidents. According to Mark Tarallo, a senior editor at Security Management: “The 1999 massacre in Littleton, Colorado, marked a turning point in virtually all aspects of school shootings, from the behaviour of the assailant to the police response strategy to the concept of what constitutes a safe school building.”
The key lesson of Columbine was that the first respondents are no longer the police; the potential victims in the building are now the first respondents, and parents are far away from school. Before Columbine, police response time was 12 to 18 minutes, and now response time has been reduced to less than 10 minutes.
We need people in school buildings to change how they respond. For example, when Pastor Mboro went to school wielding a panga, there was panic all over because there had been no safety training.
The school assailant operates more like a terrorist, with a new credo: “Kill people, create a body count, and get the media on the national and international level to take notice of you and what you did.”
South African schools should also consider introducing shooter response training. Schools in the US have introduced shooter response training sessions. For verisimilitude, the training firm brings weapons loaded with “simunition” bullets and fires off a few rounds during the session.
Trainers teach school faculty to fight back if appropriate. In one scenario, teachers were told to take off their shoes and throw them at the shooter, with the objective of distracting the assailant.
However, it was decided that students would not be instructed to fight back. Administrators were concerned that this would increase “the fear factor” in young children, and they anticipated that parents would object. During the training sessions, teachers were encouraged to think of three main options in an active shooting scenario: hide, barricade, or evacuate.
Our schools must also undergo a physical security assessment. For example, some schools in the US opted to instil a wireless proximity card-based locking system. Teachers wear the card on a lanyard around their neck, and when they bring it near the lock, it locks automatically.