School Security

A friend of mine sent me an article from the Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle, regarding the lengths that the school districts there are going to help prevent another Columbine or Pennsylvania Amish disaster on their campuses. What I found most interesting is that just four paragraphs into the article the following statistic appears:

An average of nine or 10 homicides, including the Columbine school massacre in 1999, occur in the 119,000 schools in the United States each year, says Dewey G. Cornell, a University of Virginia professor who studies youth violence. Even one death is tragic, but Cornell says these events are so few that it would take 12,000 to 13,000 years for each school to have one if they were spread around equally.

Despite the fact that violent deaths in schools are extremely rare, they've taken a front seat in the minds of many educators, students and parents. The fears appear to be driven by ever-widening media coverage of local and national events, from shootings hundreds and thousands of miles away to a string of false bomb threats in Rochester's suburban schools.

These two paragraphs are the most compelling fact in this whole piece. I don't think any parent would object to increasing security at their local schools in order to prevent another tragedy, but at what cost? In order to plan that your school will be hit sometime in the next 12,000 years begs the question of how much money should be spent on these types initiatives, versus truly educational needs of the student, educators and the districts themselves? Seems like a no brainer to me that security initiatives should not take money away from educational endeavors.