According to gunviolencearchive.org, in the year of 2016 alone, there were 51,820 incidents regarding gun violence. Even more devastating is that 2,331 of the deaths caused by gun violence were teen deaths ranging from ages 12 to 17. With statistics like these, it’d make sense if some young people felt hesitant about going to school or leaving their house. The world is an eventful unpredictable place and the increasing number of mass shootings is alarming, especially when many of the mass shootings have taken place in schools around the country.
Chang Liu
Safety is one of the biggest
concerns in every school. The importance of it on the surface seems obvious but if we dive deeper we see how safety is to essential to a quality education. La Joya teachers agree that their students do better when they feel safe. Anatomy teacher, Ms. Landgrebe, offered some scientific truth to this statement, “When the brain is focused on simply surviving, it’s almost impossible to be able to focus on anything else”. Research done by Johanna R. Lacoe from New York University agrees that “a safe environment is a prerequisite for learning”. The data presented by the research shows that students who reported feeling unsafe underperformed and had more absences than students who didn’t.
This raises the question: Do students at La Joya feel safe coming to school? The students interviewed both agreed that they feel safe coming to school and when asked if there was anything that the school could do to make them feel more safe 11th grader, Melissa Adame Perez, said, “No, I think what the school has done is fine enough.” Overall, the students reported feeling very satisfied with the security set in place by the school. But AP World History teacher, Ms. Brasch, slightly disagrees.
When asked if she believed her students felt safe at school she responded, “Yes, in terms of physical safety. But emotional safety? Not so much.” Feeling emotionally safe is just as important as feeling physically safe and Ms. Brasch says that “the school has already done a lot to ensure that safety like the LGBTQ+ safe spaces and in advisory lessons but it’s also up to the teachers and students to ensure that safety as well. Students need to feel comfortable about reporting to teachers about feeling unsafe”.
La Joya Community High School, whose mascot is the lobo, has a motto “The strength of the pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack”. Everyone needs to make an effort to make sure that we create a positive productive learning environment by ensuring safety. With this advancement, our students are more likely to reach academic excellence.
