First Person Singular
Violence not all that makes schools unsafe

By Chelsea McCoy
Buffalo High School

Feeling safe at Buffalo High School isn’t a question — it’s more of a way of life.

The issue of safety isn’t exactly something that comes up a lot at Buffalo. It’s the type of place where everybody knows each other, and for the most part everybody talks to everybody else. Sure, there are the occasional fights and squabbles but no one truly worries about a fellow classmate bringing a gun to school. It just doesn’t happen.

I am not writing this article as a blueprint for someone to attack my school. I am simply writing this to express the opinions and feelings of many of my classmates and myself.

Buffalo High School is easily the smallest high school in Putnam County. Smaller doesn’t necessarily mean safer, but in the case of Buffalo, it helps. There have been bomb threats and the occasional student bringing his new pocketknife to school to show off to his friends, but nothing serious has ever transpired.

The students at Buffalo High School feel safe because they attend a small school within a small community. Buffalo is a small school, so the teachers know all of their students and the students know the school staff. It is easy to spot an outsider.

Buffalo’s biggest safety issues are not nuts with guns but rather the aging facilities. The windows are single-paned glass that rattles when the wind blows, the parking lots flood each time it rains, the classrooms are overcrowded and there is little space to eat lunch.

The hallways are so overcrowded that in the case of a fire or a need to exit the building quickly, it would create a disaster in itself. Even if a student did bring a gun to school, it would be extremely difficult to spot it during a class change because it is becoming harder to navigate between classes with this overcrowding.

When school safety is mentioned, most people think of kids bringing guns to school. But I think of facilities that are overcrowded and outdated.

It is dangerous to have to attend school when there is no power, yet students at Buffalo have had to attend classes twice this year with partial or no electricity. It is dangerous to have to drive through two feet of water in the parking lot just to get to school, and it is dangerous to have overcrowded hallways.