Opinion | Michigan schools don’t need heavy-handed edicts to improve safety

As superintendents of two of Michigan’s best public school districts, we have a responsibility to  ensure we are providing students every possible support to help them succeed in the classroom, on the playing field and wherever we see them excelling.

Our commitment gives us the added, and significant, responsibility of doing everything we can to keep our students safe. Tragedies are every educator’s worst nightmare and schools across Michigan are redoubling efforts to work with communities and law enforcement to keep our students safe and feeling protected.

Over the past year, Lansing lawmakers made significant new funding available to our schools to develop new security plans, procedures and upgrades that are being implemented in buildings across Michigan.

These funds are paying for critical improvements. Schools across the state have been able to hire security officers, upgrade alarms, install weapon detection systems and implement significant overall upgrades; including building locks and other student safety infrastructure.

This funding also plays an important role in the well-being of our students. Whether it’s seeing news of school shootings, false threats being or other warnings of violence they are forced to endure, these new resources have allowed hired counselors and social workers that are working around the clock to help ensure our students are in the best position possible to learn, grow and thrive. 

Most importantly, this funding from Lansing has provided flexibility for every school district to work with their community to make the best safety decisions. 

To be clear, there is no one-size-fits-all policy that Lansing can pass to make our schools safer. Instead, providing the resources, and the commitment to keep investing in the programs they have created, gives us the best opportunity to meet the specific safety needs of every one of our buildings.

In Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, for example, these funds have put in place a new mobile weapon detection system as well as additional cameras, new visitor and emergency management software and new technology to communicate better with first responders. 

In Southfield Public Schools, these funds have paid for upcoming staff training sessions, upgrades to safety infrastructure that include door blocks, secured vestibules, visitor management systems and augmented security systems.

In both of our cases, the flexibility included in this funding allowed us, alongside our law enforcement agencies, to make the best decisions for the safety of our students. 

This would not have been possible with heavy-handed approaches that assume what might work in one school will somehow work in every school in the state. 

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and our legislative leaders deserve a great deal of credit for making the safety and well-being of our students a priority in the budget. It’s clear that this funding is making an immediate difference.

We now strongly urge Lansing to continue to focus school safety discussions about keeping the funding in place in the budget, maintaining the flexibility in how those funds are spent and avoiding bureaucratic red tape. This will allow our schools, our local law enforcement agencies and our communities to continue to work together to make the best decisions possible for our students.