USA.- On the back door of a home in Flint, Michigan, hangs a black Trailmaker backpack belonging to Jaxon Williams, a third grader at Freeman Elementary. But it hasn’t been used for almost a week.
“It’s officially retired, just like a T-shirt,” said her mother, Ladel Lewis, a City Council member.
That’s because Jaxon and more than 2,800 students at 11 Flint Community Schools campuses are subject to a backpack ban that began this week after district officials became alarmed by threats to student safety.
The ban will be in effect at least until the end of the school year in mid-June.
After the first week of the ban, Dr. Lewis and other parents in the district expressed their frustration and skepticism, saying that a determined student could hide weapons under their clothing.
Some experts question the effectiveness of those bans.
The ban, which allows small bags, occurred less than two weeks after a security threat was received and led to the closure of a high school in that district for two days.
At a special meeting of the Flint Board of Education, teachers expressed growing concern about school safety after a series of school shootings have occurred across the country, including one in Oxford, Michigan, a community located 30 miles outside of Flint, where a student killed four classmates at a high school in 2021.
Younger children have also brought weapons to school. In January, a six-year-old first grader in Newport News, Virginia, killed his teacher with a gun.
“In my 15 years of service here at Flint Community Schools, I have never felt this way,” Ernest Steward, the district’s director of student services, said at a meeting.
The concern for STeward’s safety is valid, said Justin Heinze, an educational psychologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health who focuses on school violence prevention.
“It is undeniable that the number of shootings and the severity of them is increasing in schools,” Heinze said.
