Parents’ fears for their children’s safety at school are at a 20-year high, according to a new national poll released Tuesday. But despite that, a majority oppose putting armed teachers in classrooms as a way to bolster campus security.
Fewer than a third of parents said they were very confident their children’s schools could deter a shooting, the PDK Poll found, and 34 percent said they feared for their kids’ safety on campus.
A strong majority of American parents said rather than armed teachers, they’d support spending money on school police officers, student mental-health services and campus metal detectors, the poll found.
Pollsters found the results from the 2018 school safety questions so powerful they decided to release that data Tuesday, before the full results from the 50th annual PDK Poll are to be published next month. The yearly poll aims to judge the public’s view of public schools.
The poll findings were “so compelling and timely we wanted to get it out there first,” said Joshua Starr, chief executive officer of PDK International, the professional educator organization which has been conducting the yearly poll since 1969, speaking on a telephone call to reporters Monday.
This year’s poll was conducted after the school shootings in February at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland and in January at a high school in Marshall County, Ky. Just as the polling was winding down — and when most but not all participants had already been questioned — there was a school shooting in May in Santa Fe, Texas, that left 10 dead.
The poll’s authors called it “disturbing” that one in three parents feared for their children’s safety on campus and expressed such a “fundamental concern” about schools. They said parents with lower incomes, those who lived in urban areas and those who were not white were the most fearful.
Fears about school safety were worse in 1998, they noted, when two school shootings — one in Arkansas and one in Oregon — prompted widespread media coverage. But by 2013, only 12 percent of parents reported being fearful, meaning this year’s 34 percent represents a “steep increase” from five years ago.
The poll found strong opposition to arming teachers (63 percent opposed) but strong support for police officers on campus (80 percent supported).
Parents were more supportive of arming school staff if they underwent lots of training (at least 80 hours), but half were still opposed even with strict conditions.
Suggestions to arm teachers and increase the number of police officers on campuses were popular responses to this year’s shootings.
The massacre of 17 people at the Parkland school prompted discussions about both proposals in Tallahassee and in communities across the state. More police officers will be on Florida school campuses when the new academic year starts in August and some school districts with have armed “guardians” as well, under a new Florida law that allows some school staff to carry guns.
lpostal@orlandosentinel.com 407-420-5273
