The case for protecting private schools
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This week’s events also puts the safety precautions of private schools in the spotlight. Private schools face both regulatory and financial hurdles to developing safety plans that are comparable to their public school peers. To dive deeper into these challenges and others, National Review spoke to Dr. Jeff Walton and Dr. Larry Taylor, leaders at two of the country’s largest Christian school associations.
“We are grieving,” explained Taylor, the president of Association of Christian Schools International, an organization that has thousands of members schools. “Every Christian school leader the next morning, they were having meetings with their teams,” Taylor explained, adding that he is having regular Zoom calls with Christian school leaders throughout the world.
According to Walton, the executive director of the American Association of Christian Schools, which has over 700 member schools, “at almost every school, there have been meetings of safety teams and school leadership teams and people looking at what happened Monday at Nashville and what are we doing to beef up security and protect our students.”
“As far as I know the school shooting in Nashville at a private Christian school was the first mass shooting at a private Christian school since the 1970s. Our schools have been in some ways protected from that. They’ve been very safe places, but there’s been an elevated level of concern today because of what happened in Nashville,” he added.
Walton explained that the security measures at private Christian schools are like those at many other schools: single and monitored entry into the school building, security cameras, and volunteer security personnel that are on campus to create an awareness. “I’ve been in schools where there were retired men in golf carts patrolling the property all the time, just greeting people. That’s a form of security. They would notice that someone is on campus that wasn’t supposed to be there,” Walton said.
“Christian schools tend to be smaller organizations and really tight-knit communities. That was true of Covenant, that generally contributes to student safety but not perfectly as was evidenced on Monday,” Walton said.
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The response of the Nashville police was very professional and effective, but it cannot take the place on the ground security teams and school officials with weapons.
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