Fearing the future

The school board wants to make certain everyone is reading from the same book when it comes to school safety.

Specifically they want protocols in place to handle extreme situations and they want to ensure every school uses the same coding when it comes to these situations. If a code blue means get all the students out of the school in Yarmouth it ought to mean the same thing in Digby or Shelburne schools.

That makes perfectly good sense.

Sadly, considering what’s been taking place in educational establishments around North America these days, school boards have to prepare for the worse.

But there’s a fine line between such preparation—as sensible as it is—and thinking every person who smiles when he or she sees a child having fun in a playground is a pervert.

We saw something similar to that that recently in the Arcadia area when someone with a BB gun promoted a call to police and the locking down of the school. On one hand what do you do when someone says there’s someone with a gun in the proximity of a school? You can’t ignore that, considering, as we say, what’s taken place in schools recently. But on the other hand people with guns in this county especially around hunting season is pretty well the norm. That may be a problem too but we have seen far too often that once something happens, like a school shooting many provinces or states away, every time there’s anything remotely connected we jump into the worst-possible-thing-that-could-happen-might-happen mode.

It’s like any time a school bus is involved in even the most minor of accidents it’s big news. Or when a few litres of oil spill into a ditch after a car accident it’s treated like a major environmental story.

The fact of the matter is a lot of time these things are not big news. The consequences have no real ramification of the day-to-day lives of all concerned.

More often than not they aren’t serious. Sometimes it’s just someone with a BB gun squirrel hunting, or a deer hunter walking by with a rifle heading into the woods. Should they too realize that considering what has been going on in the world they shouldn’t make the gun so visible? Of course. But, as we say, this is not a community where guns are rare.

We understand the concern and we see the merit in the school board’s plan—endorse it actually– but we also hope small-town Canada, and we’re a part of it, doesn’t end up raising a generation of kids who live in fear of everything. Behind it all we ought to be aware but understand not everyone is a threat.