The Bright Side
School Safety.
Are Lake Geneva schools safe? The answer is “yes”, but first realize that the term safe is a relative term. Nothing is 100% safe, so describing something as being safe is a relative term based on statistics and probabilities. Nationwide there are 56.6 million students and, since 2012, an average of 28 students are killed in schools every year. So that is to say one student for every 202,000 students is killed in school. Comparing that to the transportation data where every year 800 students are killed in accidents just traveling to and from school.
Analyzing statistics begins to put the concerns about violence in school from a more realistic perspective. Perhaps rather than putting police in the schools, it might be more effective (at saving lives) if more officers were set to monitoring traffic before the school day begins and after it ends. 28.5 times more students get killed traveling to and from school than in schools, and almost all of those deaths could have been avoided if traffic laws were better enforced and obeyed. The enforcement of traffic laws has become a bit relaxed, and like any laws that are not enforced, they then become increasingly ignored. The partial result is that accidental death is the top cause of death for all age groups below 45, except for congenital defects in the very young.
Any child’s death is a tragic experience, especially if it could have been prevented, but over-reaction does not make one safer, in fact, over-reaction has been the cause of many unnecessary tragedies. Rational thought and careful planning are most effective at prevention in a free society, not the display of force, which many times also creates an uneasy feeling or enmity in an otherwise safe environment and sometimes the response itself can create the problem it was intended to prevent, which relates to why the police presence in the downtown has been reduced during the tourist season. That course of action has been very effective. Putting police in schools will likely prove remarkably ineffective.
Whisker Walk.
The Whisker Walk is one of Lakeland Animal Shelter’s best fundraisers. The Whisker Walk will be taking place this coming weekend, on Saturday, September 29th, from 10 a.m. until noon. Bring your furry friends and family out to the animal shelter and join other folks and their furry friends in raising money for the shelter, and the over twenty-five hundred animals it cares for every year. The Whisker Walk is one of the largest annual fundraisers for the shelter. If you are interested in this event and would like to participate, registration will take place before the walk.