Daniel’s Column

But before they made that costly decision, they tried to study it from every angle.

The school’s safety coordinator asked me to meet him at a school one morning to show me how complicated adding metal detectors would be on that campus.

I arrived before him, and I wasn’t sure where he wanted to meet. So I walked to the entrance of the school. It was locked. But before I could even knock, a student — one who clearly had good intentions and good manners — opened the door to let me in. The student didn’t know me, but I immediately got right into the front of the school.

Eventually, I found the safety coordinator outside, on the other side of the building. And I immediately had a question for him.

“Locking doors. Metal detectors. All of these safety precautions are great,” I said. “But it all goes for naught if a student opens a door for a stranger. How do you stop that from happening?”

I ask myself that question a lot when I think about my kids at school. If one of my children opens a door for a stranger in public, they get applauded. But I’ve got to figure out how to teach them not to do it at school.

As a parent, I constantly struggle with how we fortify our schools to keep them safe. And I also struggle with how, as a society in general, we react to social media threats of violence against schools so that we can stop them from happening.

In Volusia County, the sheriff’s office has started videoing every student who makes a school threat doing a perp walk. They then release the student’s name and charges. A student as young as 11 was filmed recently.

The Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office has vowed to do something similar, with Sheriff Bob Johnson saying he’d make students “Facebook famous” if they made a school threat, which is a felony. Johnson’s words alone hopefully serve as a deterrent.

Overall, I have mixed feelings. It’s certainly beyond my comprehension to understand why anyone, children included, would post a threat against a school on social media. Even an 11-year-old should know better. It’s not a joke. And parents need to do better too. Why does an 11-year-old even have social media?

However, I worry what the response might be from the child. Would a student being arrested enjoy the five-minutes of fame, which could lead to more bad intentions? Or would that student become labeled to the point that it’d be hard not to feel isolated?

Should one really dumb Facebook post — even one as serious as this is — label you for the rest of your life? Imagine being 11 and having that label.

And why don’t we post a video of everyone — adults included — who has a felony charge doing a perp walk? Why limit it to just school-related threats?

I know something has to be done to ensure these students understand the seriousness of posting a threat on a social media account. I’ve seen law enforcement agencies of all sizes in three different states try to figure out how to deter these types of threats. But I just don’t think what Volusia County is doing is the answer.

Here’s what I do know: Parents, you need to talk to your children.

Talk to them about not opening locked doors at school. And talk to them about the seriousness of posting or sharing a post threatening violence toward a school.