Wednesday, August 12, 1998

School safety paramount as session begins

If you're getting ready to start school in Abilene, you're already late. Wylie schools begin today, and many Big Country schools won't start until Monday. But opening bells rang Tuesday to commence AISD's new fall term. Even though the calendar says it will still be summer until late September and even though today's thermometer clearly seconds that notion, the season of vacation has abruptly concluded, sending thousands of youngsters from hundreds of Abilene families back into the massive, collective effort of public education.

It seems unreal that summer should already be over - as unreal, perhaps, as the idyllic vision conjured up by the metaphor of countryside school bells ringing. Nowadays, of course, it's more of a grating, high-tech buzz than a tinkling bell. And public education has become a considerably more complex endeavor than the picture of an idealized, one-room schoolhouse can possibly convey.

Nationwide, the 1998 spring term presented nightmare images that clashed unthinkably with the peace of the country school with the little bell - images of schoolchildren bloody and dying and dead, gunned down by their own classmates. In Pearl, Miss., in Fayetteville, Tenn., in Pomona, Calif., in Edinboro, Pa., in West Paducah, Ky., in Jonesboro, Ark., and in Springfield, Ore., the country saw horror follow upon horror. We struggled to explain it, and we prayed it wouldn't happen again.

Abilene's schools - as, indeed, most of the nation's schools - have been blessed not to witness such violence. As a new academic year begins, we hope our children remain unharmed, that the corridors and playgrounds and parking lots will merely be places they pass through on their way to obtaining the knowledge and skills that will start them on productive careers as adults in the outside world.

The one-room schoolhouse may be obsolete, but the value of an education has never been higher, for the future of individual students and for the future of the larger society they come from and will return to. We wish everyone a productive, safe school year.