What Next - Why There’s a Cop at Your Kid’s School

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Slate Podcasts

News Commentary, Politics, News

4.5 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2023

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s been one year since the Uvalde school shooting – and while Texas hasn’t passed any gun control legislation, it has passed a measure aimed at “hardening schools.” Last week, Governor Greg Abbott signed HB-3 into law, requiring every public school to have an armed officer on campus. The legislation comes even as a former sheriff’s deputy is on trial in Florida for failing to protect students when a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.

Do school safety officers stop school shootings? And if they don’t – what do they do instead?

Guest: Anya Kamenetz, education reporter and author of "The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, And Where We Go Now."

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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme and Rob Gunther.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Maltesers salute the mother lovers. They can be your boss, your partner, your friend or, you know, yourself.
0:08.1	One thing we know is that every mum deserves a mother lover. Find helpful tips for mums and
0:13.5	mother lovers at mortises.co.uk. Maltesers, less light in the load for working mums.
0:20.2	If you walk into any public school in New York City, even an elementary school, you'll be greeted the same way.
0:33.7	Not by the principal, not by a teacher. It's so funny, right? Because it's going to be a police officer.
0:39.3	Ony a cabinet is an education reporter. She lives in Brooklyn, just like me.
0:48.5	I remember when I first set my kids to school in New York City. I was kind of shocked that there
0:55.2	was a police presence inside them and that the police presence was so evident, like the second you
1:00.0	got in. And I sort of assumed it was a city thing. Yeah, but that's actually not true. It is
1:05.3	really common and it's very much a product of the sort of like the age of column line.
1:11.3	I called Ony up because I wanted to talk about this police presence. Tens of thousands of schools
1:17.1	now have what they call student resource officers, which is a nice way of saying police officers
1:22.8	who work in schools. Many of them carry guns and after every school shooting, the clamor for more
1:29.6	of these officers gets louder. We can't stop bad people from doing bad things. They're going to
1:35.7	hours after 19 children were gunned down at an elementary school in Yvalda, Texas. The state
1:41.7	attorney general went on Fox News and suggested that arming people in schools could keep kids safe.
1:48.2	Even though in Yvalda, the schools actually had their own police force.
1:52.9	Having the right training for some of these people at the school is the best open and nothing's
1:58.1	going to work perfectly, but that in my opinion is the best answer to this problem.
2:04.0	A few months later, Senator Ted Cruz got more specific.
2:08.3	I think the number one thing that makes schools safer is having more armed police officers
2:14.4	on campus to keep our students safe. Then just last week, Texas mandated that every public school
	...

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