We were not the only ones to think of school safety in our communities when a gunman walked unchallenged into an Amish school in Pennsylvania and
killed five children. Were children any safer in our public schools?
We could ask administrators for their security plan, but would we get a candid answer? Editors here concluded that the only way to measure school security would be to conduct an unannounced test.
When first approached with the idea, I reacted with an editor's usual caution: What's our legal vulnerability? Is there a risk of causing a disruption that will later prove embarrassing to the newspaper? Are we putting anyone's safety in jeopardy? Are there any ethical considerations that we'll have to justify to readers?
My first call was to our attorney, to determine whether our school visit would be grounds for a criminal trespassing charge. I learned that, in Maryland, it isn't -- unless a person refuses to leave when asked. I even had a confidential call with the local prosecutor, who also concluded -- after the test -- that no law would be broken. Several years earlier, we had used underaged teenagers to attempt to buy liquor in local stores and extracted a promise from the local state's attorney not to prosecute the teens or the newspaper.
We then checked Poynter Online for guidance and found a helpful
list of questions to ask ourselves. The reporting team was assembled and instructions were issued: They were to stay no more than 20 minutes in each school, leave whenever asked, provide their names and assignment when challenged, neither break no law nor lie, do nothing to jeopardize anyone's safety, call an editor if a complication arose, and use common sense.
On Oct. 12, 12 out of our 20 staff reporters fanned out across the community and visited 56 elementary, middle and high schools shortly after school opened for the day. At 24 schools, reporters entered through propped-open side doors or front doors. They walked freely around the schools and past school staff for the allotted 20 minutes. One reporter even sat at a library desk and casually leafed through a book. The results would have been worse had school administrators not gotten wise to the test and sent out an alert to all schools.
Only one incident resulted in police action: A principal of an elementary school called Annapolis police, who arrived after the reporter had left the school. After hearing about our test, officers came to the newspaper's offices and verified the reporter's name and his assignment. They determined that no law had been broken, but filed a routine incident report.
I gave a courtesy call to the school superintendent once the reporters returned to the newsroom.
The
story was published in the Oct. 15 edition of
The Sunday Capital. The package included a main story, summaries of the experiences of each reporter and an editor's note that included the ages and physical descriptions of the reporters. We even included photos of the reporters to help readers visualize the appearances of the intruders. Most importantly, the editor's note reported that schools had been alerted to the security breaches so that corrections could be made before the story appeared.
Public reaction was swift. The majority of readers expressed gratitude to the newspaper for exposing lax security and demanded more protection from administrators. However, at least two readers wrote letters to the editor expressing anger at the newspaper for putting their children at risk.
My
editor's column the following Sunday addressed the ethical considerations for the test and provided ample feedback from readers.
What did we accomplish? Two days after our test, a Baltimore television station interviewed me for a story on our experiment and tried to duplicate the test at one local school. They were quickly ushered off the property, thus suggesting that the schools were more guarded after our exposé.
Several days later, the schools sent a letter to all parents that promised more vigilance and announced new safety initiatives: ID badges for all personnel and a new security plan that included cameras and classroom intercoms.
We stumbled onto one other ethical consideration: The editor of one of our weekly newspapers had recently accepted a job as public information officer for the school system. Would it be better to keep him in the dark or include him and ask him not to call his new employer? I decided it would be easier for him to plead ignorance to his new boss than explain that he had to broker an agreement with his old boss. He was kept in the dark as his reporters operated in secret. He voluntarily turned over the production of the next issue to another editor and left the newspaper, as scheduled, before the story appeared.
Perhaps we were lucky that no one panicked. There were no lockdowns or arrests, classes were not interrupted and no reporter was physically assaulted by police or an overly reactive teacher. All of those were possibilities to consider.
The only thing we might do differently next time is alert the local police. If there is a trusting relationship with the police chief, he could probably head off any nasty standoff or school lockdown. I also would recommend that other papers doing a similar project maximize the number of reporters involved, because they have a short time to complete their task before a school-wide alert is issued by administrators.
