Friday, March 5, 2010

Violence in Schools

We had a somewhat eventful day yesterday. Actually, down on my end of the building it was extremely uneventful, for which I'm incredibly grateful, but there was an incident involving a student with a gun in our school.

While it was happening, the only thing we in the classroom knew was that we were on lockdown. The principal communicated over the school PA system that the entire school was on lockdown until further notice around 8 am. Apparently, a student brought a gun to school (although no bullets were found). Another student told a teacher, and that teacher notified the appropriate people and the situation was contained and resolved quickly. We did remain on lockdown for quite a while, just in case, and we ended up keeping 1st block all the way through 3rd since testing was delayed. According to my teacher, this is the first time that our school has had an incident of this nature.

On my part, I was extremely impressed with the way faculty and administration reacted to and dealt with this potentially nightmarish situation.

My question is, how are students supposed to sit down and take a standardized test (that has a direct impact on their future) after an occurrence like this? It bothers me that so much weight is placed on standardized test scores without taking any other factors into consideration. Such as whether or not there was a gun threat at their school on the day they tested.

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