News-Record.com

Amen, Doug. I couldn't agree more.

Unfortunately, it's becoming too clear that for some school board members, school safety simply isn't a priority. They would rather push their social agenda - even if it means schools aren't safe. It doesn't seem to matter that the vast majority of the community, black and white, supports SROs; these school board members seem determined to bow to the false god of political correctness, no matter what the price.

Here's the problem I see: Deena Hayes is just one of 11 school board members. Where are the other members stepping up and saying, "We demand safe schools and won't let racial issues stand in the way of school safety"?

So far, board members Anita Sharpe, Susan Mendenhall and Marti Sykes have spoken up in favor of SROs and they should be applauded for doing the right thing. But why won't the rest of the board stand up to Deena Hayes?

If anything, Hayes' point about disenfranchised white males and school shootings only reinforces the need for SROs. Like you said, the victim doesn't care about the assailant's race - he or she just wants to be protected. That's why we need to keep SROs in the middle schools.

One quick update: President Bush is holding his school safety summit today, prompted by the recent spate of school shootings. The following is from an Associated Press article on the summit:

"Encouraging school kids to be informants when necessary may be one way to stop violence before it erupts, a summit called by President Bush was told Tuesday.

"Our first line of prevention is really having good intelligence," Delbert Elliott, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence in Boulder, Colo., told participants in a conference called by President Bush administration in the wake of a spate of recent shootings in schools."
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So an expert on preventing school violence says that good intelligence - "snitches", as Deena Hayes called them - is a vital component to safe schools. Now tell me again why we want to take SROs out of the schools?

I applaud President Bush for making school safety a priority. I just wish the Guilford County Board of Education shared his concern.

It just possibly could be that the race issue is the only agenda that Deena feels she needs to provide to her constituents whose lowered expectations result in poor representation.

In addition to speaking against violence in schools, the President needs to revisit his NCLB legislation and have it amended to provide for financial assistance to the student of a failing school who wants to attend a private school. As a result of this legislation, I believe the number of students transferring out of a failing school is less than 4%. The failure to champion this feature was a major oversight by this administration.

If Deena Hayes was truly interested in the problem (instead of pursuing her hate-campaign against white people) she would explore why blacks commit crimes in larger proportion to their representation than white people. She would take those results and try to help HER people act appropriately and law-abiding in a school or social setting.
Therein lies the answer, not castigating those that merely observe and catch blacks committing crimes.

When she shows me her magic formula for figuring out which kid will bring a gun to school so we can place an SRO there just in the nick of time, I'll listen to her prattle.

But my kid was in the Grimsley parking lot when a vice principal was shot and a student killed himself. He watched it, he called WFMY (he interned there), he came home and was very upset for days (almost as much as I was).

I want SROs in the schools. I want them with tasers and to be frank, I'd like more of them. There are, I think, 11 buildings at Grimsley. How can one SRO manage all of that?