A shooting tragedy recently at a high school near my home town of Seattle produced, (within a half hour), a barrage of media pundits, politicians, and interest groups across the nation, exploiting the death of our school kids, and the tragedy, for agenda driven issues such as gun control, bullying, mental illness, racism, 'more money for schools', and ratings. In no case that I observed was thrift given to the risk factors for such an event in our schools.
This blog post will deal with the numbers that illustrate exactly how safe we have already made our schools. The shooting at Sandy Hook, and at Marysville High School near Seattle, is a human tragedy, and a horror to our nation and the grieving parents, but it is not a reflection of whether our schools are safe. They are.
Barack Obama on the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting in December, 2012 .....
"Can we say that we're truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose? I've been reflecting on this the last few days," ... "If we're honest with ourselves, the answer is no. And we will have to change."
He is wrong! While Obama's remarks were clearly the politically expedient thing to say for a president who has always believed his wisdom exceeds ours, it was an outrageous and ignorant idea for President Obama to suggest we don't take care of our children as a reason for the school shooting!
Does the president, or any of his political advisors and speech writers, ever use a calculator?
Really?
(Take this risk quiz from the Harvard Center For Risk Analysis and compare it to the risks in school you are about to read about in the remainder of this blog)
Ok, reality check. So what are the actual statistical risks to your child in the classroom without the noise of media pundits, talking heads, politicians, and pro and anti gun lobbyists ... NONE of whom give you any actual risk factors while pontificating and cynically using the tragedy to springboard their agendas. What are the real odds of a child being killed in an American k-12 classroom, during school hours, by someone else from within or from outside of the school.
According to US census statistics approximately 33,000,000 (33 million) children in America are of of the age to attend kindergarten thru 12th grade in high school. The average public school year is approximately 180 school days.
In 2012, 23 children have actually died of murder in school in two different incidents. This would include the 20 young souls at Sandy Hook elementary school and three in another incident in Chardon, Ohio on February 27th 2012.
Remember these 23 murders occurred in two incidents. Rounded a bit for simplicity, the odds of a given child running into one of those two incidents on any given school day, in any given school in 2012 in the United States, are 1 in 3,300,000,000. (One in 3.3 trillion). Your odds of winning the recent Powerball lottery were about 18 times greater.
If each of the 23 murders was a separate incident, the odds of your child encountering that incident would still be 1 in 330,000,000. (One in 330 million). The odds of winning the recent Powerball lottery were almost twice as likely.
We have made our schools quite safe. In fact a U.S school is the single safest place in the world for a child with no close second. We have always taken care of our children in schools and, shockingly, have done so even before the last last six years of new and advanced presidential wisdom and advice.
Every parent does their utmost to raise their children safely, in life and in school, and see to it that the odds of harm to our children are minimized. I take pains to even make sure that children other than my own are also safe. We all do. We have been doing so since the dawn of time, it is our parenting DNA, and no presidential decree to do so is needed. Who is the president talking to, or about, exactly?
We all recognize that everything we do in life for our children has a risk. We rarely know what the actual risk statistics really are. What are the odds of children being hit by a car because they couldn't hear the car with an Ipod speaker in their ear? It's millions of times higher than being murdered in a classroom, yet a parent bought them one anyway and exposed them to the risk. Parents certainly bought the kids a bicycle and we all know what happens there. Did we give them the keys to the car? Do we have a gun in the home? All these carry risks millions of times higher than the risks of putting them in a classroom yet we took those risks anyway. If we were "truly doing enough" to ensure our child's safety, there would be no bicycle, car keys, or Ipod given to the kids. Why then all the paranoia about the danger in schools?
Our schools are the safest place to be for protection from murder anywhere in the world and there is no close second. Not even our own homes are as safe as our schools.
* Chart below is from the National Safety Council. "Odds Of Dying"
