FULTON COUNTY, Ga. — For nearly two hours at Banneker High School Monday night, the ideas and hopes for protecting students from outside violence getting inside the school stirred commitments from administrators and parents to do more to attack its root causes.
Banneker’s principal said that Monday’s town hall meeting, which was as much of a sounding board for fearful parents demanding answers as it was an incubator for solutions, would be just the first in a series of town halls, to get to the cures for the kinds of violence that too many schools have faced, including Banneker.
Last week, two Banneker High School students were attacked inside the school, and stabbed and wounded. Three students were taken into custody.
There are nearly 1,600 students attending Banneker. Fewer than 200 parents attended Monday’s town hall at Banneker.
Many of the parents at the town hall, along with the principal and Fulton County’s School Superintendent and Union City’s Mayor and others, said that adding more security, and adding more programs to help troubled teens, will fail to help if everyone doesn’t find ways to involve more of the parents.
“I’m out here in this community every day,” one woman from the audience said at the meeting. “I know these kids in the community. They cry to me. Until you come to a connection with our parents, it’s not gonna work.”
Administrators described initiatives already underway.
One of Banneker’s administrators, Igola Jordan, said the school has already begun encouraging students to open up about their lives, encouraging them to talk about the real issues facing them at home and at school.
“Some students are coming from traumatic situations at home,” Jordan said. “I’ve asked them, ‘what happened to you?’”
Jordan said students describe suicides in their families, friends dying in their arms, fighting depression and anxiety, living in poverty and hunger.
The school has started involving community partners with private resources available, “so we could help families” and guide students out of hopelessness that can sometimes cause them to act out violently toward others.
“We’re at a time of crisis in our schools, nationwide and in Fulton County,” said Fulton County School Superintendent Mike Looney. “The country is angry, polarized, as students are trying to return to schools to learn” but the students are finding some of the same conflicts and tensions at school as they find everywhere else.
What happened at Banneker last week, Dr. Looney said, “is not a reflection on Banneker, it’s a societal issue,” with the school system seeing “more group fights than ever. We’re grieving loss of control in society, and students, are, too.”
Administrators said one initiative the school system is pursuing is expanding conflict-resolution training for students, to prevent violence in the first place, and to encourage students and their parents to recognize conflicts among teens that arise outside the schools, as a way of preventing them from spilling into the schools.
Travis Barber was glad to hear that.
“Preventing violence, that’s the key," Barber said after the meeting. "That’s going to be the beautiful thing about it—once we get the right people here to teach these courses to these kids. That’s the answer, conflict resolution.”
Parents like Romentha Carwell, who has two children attending Banneker, agreed.
"I don't feel like my children are in any danger" in the meantime, she said. She also urged administrators to expand the curriculum, to help those students who would be more interested in attending school and succeeding if the school were to teach them practical skills in getting and keeping a job, and supporting themselves, after graduation.
“How to manage finances,” for example, Carwell said, “which types of finances are required for them to live, day to day, so they’ll know that what you get here (in school) is important, and you need to learn the stuff, before you move on to the next stage of your life.”
Banneker’s principal, Dr. Jason Stamper, said he has, over the past two years, added more security cameras throughout the school, which now has nearly 50, and which are monitored throughout the day as school resource officers make their rounds, on foot, to head off problems, and to respond quickly -- as they did last week -- if violence erupts.
Some parents asked why Banneker doesn’t install metal detectors. Dr. Stamper, Dr. Looney and Fulton County Schools Police Captain Darrel McDaniel said metal detectors are of little help in improving security.
They said Banneker has some 40 outside doors, and staffing a metal detector at each one is impossible, while reducing the numbers of doors can violate fire codes. Plus, they said the equipment requires constant maintenance and adjustments to operate accurately.
Dr. Looney also urged parents to teach their children that “seeing something and hearing something suspicious or possibly threatening, and reporting it, is not the same as snitching, but it can help save lives.”
He urged parents to “know what’s inside your child’s bookbag, phones and social media accounts.”
And he promised to find strategies to create better relationships between administrators/staff and students, while coming up, somehow, with “more resources” to put into enhancing security.
Dr. Stamper said Banneker’s next, two town halls would take place at the school next week, for students and for parents, with additional town halls set for March and beyond, outside of the school, to continue working toward community-wide solutions to school violence.
Everyone has to get involved, said Union City Mayor Vince Williams. “What’s going on in the schools and the community is our fault” if everyone sits by and lets someone else worry about it. “It’s all our responsibility to make sure that we support the schools and the children.”