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Yes, and barbed wire, Czech hedgehogs, guard towers with snipers.
Jokes aside apart from preventing a ball flying into traffic during recess what are we trying to achieve?
how else are we supposed to have security theater preventing school shootings?
I see no reason not to.
Just put a big sports ground in the back. That tends to have a fence anyways. You can leave the front an open area with buildings to each side. That’ll provide another barrier without looking like a prison.
Nay. I hated elementary and middle schools that looked and felt like prisons. I’m sure it is way worse than it was twenty years ago now. The ambiance is an open threat and ode to for profit prisons
If you don’t want downvotes, you may find yourself happier on an instance that does not enable downvotes.
I’ve tried it but the scope was too limited for my interests. I would absolutely use Beehaw if they remained federated with dot world and other large instances.
I’m more concerned about the architecture being prison-like than the fence. We don’t need barbed wire, but having a clear boundary for little ones to stay inside the grounds during recess is a good thing.
I really wish they’d bring back natural lighting and windows that open. During the school shooting in south texas, a lot of people escaped through the windows because the building was old (late 60s early 70s). During Covid, the Europeans opened the school windows to let in fresh air on a regular basis. You couldn’t do either in a lot of the newer school buildings.
Dude, up/down votes are how this thing works. Don’t take the system personally.
Again anyone that feels this way is not someone I value or wish to interact with at all. The fact that anyone like this can see my posts when I have blocked them is a disgusting violation of trust. All I can do is request others to block me until I encounter an alternative to Lemmy that better fits my needs. I barely survive through massive pain day to day. I have no buffer left to compensate for psychotic negativity towards strangers. If anyone has something to say, then say it, but to be negative at diverse and opposing points of view is a regression into stupidity, echo chambers, and eventually global conflict as differences grow and accumulate. I want nothing to do with a culture or community like this. Down voting is for pointing out, bad bots, shills, trolls, and other meta problems. Suppressing discussion and diverse opinions is adolescent nonsense.
I mean it’s just an expression of disagreement. Most people aren’t fans of having their children kidnapped or them walking off and getting lost.
An expression is a reply or conversation, these have value. Anonymous negativity to strangers is psychotic behavior.
I went to highschool with a k-12 magnet school in a building from 1910. It was a beautiful historic building and was a wonderful change from the previous prison environments. No one wondered off or got abducted. It was even in a rough neighborhood and area. The grounds are of no concern here. If the kids are leaving, it is on purpose and there are far bigger issues at play, and again the issue is being handled like a prison mindset instead of a more practical approach.
Sure, otherwise the
inmatesclassmates might escape.Electrified razor wire right?
No joke we actually had barbed wire fence around my high school. Magnetically sealed doors and cops stationed at the only entrance they didn’t lock all day.
Fences are fine. Especially for young kids near the playground and streets.
Except the fact you need to maintain it (which will be in the form of a replacement every 73 years when enough kids get stabbed by it) and it needs to have enough exit points in case of emergency. It shouldn’t funnel everyone to one spot in the front.
I’m in favor of them. Just from a utilitarian standpoint, it helps to be able to demarcate the bounds of a school so that you don’t have random people just wandering up throughout the day mistaking a schoolyard for a park and causing disruptions. Moreover, it gives kids the freedom to roam relatively unsupervised during recess/break time without worry of them wandering off somewhere. In densely-populated areas, it’s basically a necessity to fence off athletic fields as well to prevent any accidental damage to nearby property if a ball goes flying.
There’s a lot that can be done to make school buildings feel less prison like, but a fence is just a fence and is innocuous enough.
Yay.
My immediate answer was yeah why not, but then I read the comments about prison fences and realised I was missing some American specific context. The fence’s at my schools were waist high with open gates. They were more of a boundary marker than anything else.
I’m from the US and this is what I remember from elementary school (the only school that had a fence in my case) in my case that would have been years 3-5
its sad really. the school system was supposed to sorta act as a public space. sorta like community colleges. kids in the day and adults at night. modern world is so messed up though.
Depends. I went to a exurb elementary school and it didn’t need a fence - walk through the woods until you get bored. However I’ve also seen schools where there is a busy road nearby and they need something to stop the kids that would run that way. (older kids would not, but very young will run without looking and a few special needs kids have no sense of what is safe)
Exactly, it entirely depends on context. In a big city they all have to be fenced, but in a rural area where the playground is in a giant open field then it’s fine to be unfenced
I’m on the fence about it.
Yeah but it depends.
An elementary school near me recently replaced their chest-height chain-link fence with a 10ft steel bar fence with spikes on top. There’s some benefits to a fence, but the spikes just make it seem menacing. And I guess more abstractly, it communicates that school is a dangerous place that’s walled-off from the rest of the world rather than a place that’s just like any other part of society. This is in the USA, I should mention, so maybe the cynical message is more accurate.Dude from where I’m from schools are built like prisons by default: tall external walls, a single big black gate for entrance, ugly indoors without any personality, no locker rooms… We Don’t have metal detectors though, only Americans have type of issues
as someone who graduated fairly recently (school added the fences my junior year) it just makes that place feel like even more of a fucking prison. also, fences are easy to bypass so all it would achieve is making it harder to escape if a shooter did get in. on top of that shooters are typically students, so it doesn’t keep them out to begin with. this means that the only two things it actually achieves are making students feel like they are in prison and keeping them on the premisis so the shooter can kill them even easier. the real answer to what the fences are supposed to do is to 1) put more effort into mental health stuff as that is often the main reason the shooter is doing it, and 2) teach kids to escape the school instead of teaching them to just kinda sit there. and before anyone replies taking about gun control, getting illegal stuff isn’t that hard (see drugs), making guns isn’t that hard (see luty submachine gun, or any 3D printed gun), and schools (including the entire campus) are already gun-free zones and have been for a long time. making things illegal does not stop people from getting them. the solution is to make people with mental conditions that make them dangerous to others get help, and to make the drills we already do better by teaching kids what will work, not what sounds nice.
No, I think I will mention gun control. Because “it’s still technically possible to get” is a world different from the dystopian American “anyone can get one at any time for extremely cheap prices with zero oversight” reality.
it’s not ‘zero oversight’, you have to get a background check and wait 2 weeks to get your gun even though you passed (this bit is kinda pointless), and other stuff as well depending on where you are and where you’re getting it. all that is irrelevant though because all a gun is is a tube with a stick in the back that hits the primer on the bullet, meaning all you need to make one is some pipe and a drill. also once again, see drugs for an example of how people will continue to attain illegal things even though they are illegan.
Exactly. People will cite the fact that gangs smuggle guns all the time. And that is true, organized crime outfits absolutely can smuggle guns. And yes, it is also possible to make a gun from a 3D printed gun frame and parts anyone can buy on the net. And you can make your ammunition. But that really doesn’t translate to 16 year olds being able to get their hands on semi-automatic rifles and large quantities of ammunition. Just think for a second, actually think mechanically how that would work. Imagine we’re in a country with widespread gun control, (but still with illegal weapons to be found/made), and we have some 16 year old white suburban kid looking to get a hold of a gun.
So we have our would-be school shooter, trying to get his hands on a gun. What are his options? Maybe he tries to buy one. He asks the guy he buys weed from if he knows how to get a gun. Do you think any dealer slinging weed to high school kids is going to want to help him with that? They’re probably a student at that school. And criminals aren’t complete idiots. What gang of hardened criminals wants to sell a rifle and ammunition to a random white kid from the suburbs? You know exactly what it’s going to be used for. Gangs may be willing to take the risk of trafficking weapons to arm themselves, but they don’t just sell guns to any random person looking to buy, let alone to someone that is clearly planning to do something horrible with it. In reality, if our would-be shooter actually manages to meet the kinds of people that traffic weapons, it wouldn’t work well for him. At best, they turn him into the cops themselves. At worst, a 16 year old from the suburbs disappears never to be heard from again.
Ok, so if he can’t buy one, can he make one? Maybe. But they would have to have an extremely a home life unmonitored to the point of violating child neglect laws. People can make quite functional 3D-printed gun frames, but it’s a skill you develop. You have to go through multiple cycles of printing, fitting, reprinting, reprinting, etc. If you actually want to have a weapon that works, you essentially need a workshop. And specifically a workshop that no one but he ever accesses. Maybe some kid out on a farm could manage that if given a high degree of independence…maybe? But if you look at the home life of the typical school shooter, it is simply not the kind of environment that would be conducive to running an elicit weapons workshop. In all but the most extremely neglectful homes, a parent is going to see them working on firearms and immediately freak the fuck out. It’s just really hard to hide the kind of setup needed to make a 3D printed gun. This setup is not beyond what can be done in a domestic hobby workshop, but it is not the kind of thing that you can easily hide or disguise. In the case of our hypothetical 16 year old, they would try to setup the equipment necessary. But they would be quickly caught. Oh, and then we need to include the whole elaborate mini forge setup needed to actually make your own rounds…
TL:DR: consider the mechanics of a hypothetical 16-year old shooter actually trying to obtain a semi-automatic rifle in a world with strict gun control. Considering either the “buy it” or “build it” scenario, it would be extremely rare for any 16 year old to be able to obtain a gun. And this is true even assuming that gun running and 3D-printed guns continue to exist.
See the sad thing is that almost your entire thoughts on this is centered around school shootings. Theres tons of other reasons schools might put up fences but to Americans kids deciding to ditch school and get into shit or getting themselves hurt or parents with custody disputes trying to gain access to their child when they shouldnt are just minor concerns.
my thoughts on that are centered around school shootings because that’s the reason schools are adding fences. to address the points you mentioned though, during my senior year when we had a fully constructed fence people still skipped school all the time (same people that always were) so the fence did not help. the whole custody thing is better solved by the parent that should have custody letting the school know about the situation at which point the school will have a legal obligation to ensure the child’s safety. shootings aside, this leaves only making kids feel like prisoners for potential changes the fence could make.
