Public Threats and Fights in High School by Hayley

Public Threats and Fights in High School by Hayley - September 2023 Scholarship Essay

“Oh, looks like the school got threatened again.” I find myself saying this more often than I would like, usually every month. I go to a fairly large 6A high school. Now, that I’m a senior, I can tell that the school is getting a lot more threats than it did when I was a freshman. Two years ago, my school received a bomb threat. Last year, right before a school-wide pep rally, we were sent into an actual lockdown because a threat of an active shooter was found written in the bathroom. None of these amounted to anything, and no one was harmed, but it was still scary, especially knowing that if the person who wrote the bathroom threat was serious, they could have caused a lot of damage at a very large pep rally. On top of all that, my school can barely go three days without students fighting with each other, whether that be physically or online. It’s commonplace when it is revealed that students got arrested for fighting. These threats and fights occupy the attention of many of my peers and can conflict with the education process at school. If my school is to become a more positive place, more useful strategies need to be implemented to greatly decrease the rates of fights and threats.
I believe my school does a decent job when dealing with public threats against the school, but it could be better. If I was a part of my school’s administration, I would try to implement a policy of no second chances. If a student makes a threat against the school, whether they are serious or not, they should have to reap serious consequences. The student should automatically be suspended, and the severity of the threat should decide the length of the suspension and/or if the student needs to be handled by the police instead of the school resource officers. This concept of not letting threats just slide would most likely decrease the rate of public threats greatly. I also believe that schools should be able to contact other authorities when trying to locate the source of a threat if it is simply writing in the bathroom. This would allow the students who made the threats to be apprehended far quicker than it would have been with just the school administration. The consequences of threatening the school need to be made very clear to the students if they are to adhere to the rules and understand what would happen if they were to make a threat. If my school adopted these policies when dealing with threats against the school, then the constant fear of suddenly being in a lockdown would not constantly plague the students, allowing them to enjoy being at school more often.
The fights that happen at my school are a different story. They happen more often than public threats, so I believe there would be a greater impact on the school if fighting decreased. I am not against building doors at the entrances of the school that have metal detectors in them. This would completely prohibit people from bringing real weapons into the school if they were inclined to do so. However, last year a student tried to strangle another student with a charging cord, so more measures would also need to be implemented. A big issue that would need to be dealt with would be to keep other students from publicizing the fights on social media. It would be a lot easier to handle fights before they got bad if students would tell adults what was happening first instead of their first thought is to record the fight to post online. Unlike the policy with the public threats, I believe schools should deal with fights using a three-strike concept. The severity of the fight would warrant how many strikes you would get, and once a student hits three strikes, expulsion or being arrested should be considered as a possibility. This policy would use the threat of punishment to decrease the want to get into a fight at school, much like the policy when dealing with public threats.
I believe that students in school should have a level of trust with one another. For some, the people in the same grade, they’ve known for almost their entire lives. This trust between students is ruined when students become obsessed with fighting people who they don’t like or threatening the school just because they don’t like the class work. If the policies I mentioned successfully decrease the rate of fights and threats that happen in a school setting, I believe that trust will be re-established between students, thus inevitably making the school a far more positive place where people’s main concerns aren’t lying and fighting just to get what they want.