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The Rice Thresher
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Michael Nalepa Thresher opinion editor Growing up in Illinois, we had tornado drills every spring. A special alarm would go off and kids would get under desks and line up along cement walls, crouched on the floor with their hands clasped over their heads for protection from fictional falling debris. We took these precautions in case a twister came along and ripped the roof off the school. It never happened, but someone felt that it was necessary. I guess that's the same reasoning behind Escape School, a new program designed to teach kids how to flee from their classes if one of their classmates starts shooting the place up. In the wake of Columbine, some people must think training like this makes sense. Escape School is visiting schools across the country, and it even came to three Houston schools two weeks ago. Kids learn useful things like how to avoid the line of fire and how to use a desk to slow a bullet. The local news even played a film clip of a group of children running down a hall and away from a fictitious gunman when they profiled Escape School two weeks ago. This is ridiculous. Does anyone remember air raid drills? Our parents had to get under desks in school to practice what would happen if the Russians dropped a load of nuclear bombs on American cities. Exactly how much protection a desk would offer against a hydrogen bomb is still unclear to me, but the exercise probably filled the same void Escape School does - it alleviated fears without solving the problem. If a child decides to bring an assault rifle and a load of pipe bombs to school, no amount of combat training is going to allow hundreds of kids to get out the door before someone gets hurt. But school tragedies like Columbine and Jonesboro can be prevented in a way that saves the lives of the attackers as well as their victims. Instead of spending money on this program, schools and the organizations that fund Escape School should focus on prevention. The goal should be to find the kids who are slipping through the cracks and becoming alienated from their peers and getting them help. The other half of the problem needs to be solved as well - schools need to teach all students to be accepting of each other, regardless of their differences. Pumping money into programs that teach kids to value each other could go a long way towards preventing tragedies - even the ones that don't make CNN. Escape School is a Band-Aid for a situation that could be prevented much earlier. School shootings will only stop if the problems that cause them are solved before shots are fired. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. It is much easier to teach kids how to run from bullets and jump out of windows than it is to make every child in a school feel like a valued individual who is part of a community. But until we do that, maybe Escape School isn't such a bad idea. Michael Nalepa is opinion editor and a Lovett College senior.
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