Letter: Multi-prong effort needed to protect children

Letter: Multi-prong effort needed to protect children

Dennis Stewart
St. Augustine, Fl

Dear Historic City News Editor,

I have been posting this recommendation for months.

What can be done now to protect our students? Putting guards in our schools or arming our teachers are being reactive to a shooter in the building.

Being proactive is to set up a surveillance perimeter around the school, not allowing the person to enter the school, to include the modular classrooms. The students aren’t being locked in. It is not a prison. this is called Technology. It would only take one person to monitor the cameras, communicates and sensors. You would use metal detectors at the main entrances. Technology is not that expensive.

Congress, who has been negligent on school security, should allocate the start-up cost for this. All schools could be retrofitted during summer. This type of technology is also mobile. It can be moved to where it is needed.

Also, the exterior doors and the classroom doors need to be hardened. And if it all possible, the external windows also should be hardened. Once the students are in their school, the external doors will not allow access from the outside. Any visitors would be required to go to a bank teller type window that will be maintained by the office staff.

You want a guard, have one available in the morning when students are arriving, then in the afternoon when they are leaving. This is when the entrance to the school will be open and susceptible to being accessed.

These types of logistics will work and can be adjusted to meet the needs of the school. This is just part of a multi-prong effort to protect our children, to also include common sense gun control laws.