It is a chilly morning for the many students lining up at the front entrance of a local DC public middle school. A mother stands impatiently in line with her four-year-old son who seems eager to be free from his mother’s grasp. “I’m going to school with the big kids today mommy,” he says proudly without any modesty or inflection. She does not reply, but instead uses her eyes to chaperone the rambunctious six-graders playing an informal game of fist-abound shoulder and body tag.

One by one, a team of security guards armed with portable metal detecting wands, an x-ray scanner, and a large metal detector gives each student a half-minute to 2 minute security investigation. The guards confiscate glass bottles of juice found in backpacks, administer thorough body pat-downs, and use their wands to scan ponytails and ankles of unlaced timberland boots.

All of the students are in uniform. Most of them are not carrying backpacks; some are carrying thin notebooks without textbooks. Some simply have unsharpened No. 2 pencils resting atop their ears or in the back pockets of their uniform pants. The less they have, the quicker they get through security. A police officer stands at the door with playful language in his voice, seeming to charm the students into heading straight to class. The students respond to him well—his handcuffs and firearm hugging his waistline conspicuously.

When it is time for the mother and her son to go through the security protocol, she tells them that her name is Ms. Barnes. “I have a parent-teacher conference regarding my daughter being suspended,” she says. “I’m here to pick up her homework assignments for the next week.” The guards nod, and proceed to usher her purse onto the x-ray scanner’s conveyor belt as if they had been pre-warned to expect her arrival.

She steps back and allows her four-year-old son to go through the metal detector first. His belt sets off the detector, and without hesitation, he immediately raises his arms to have his full body scanned. Without a sense of exemption, the guard proceeds to scan him quickly with her wand in one half-hearted stroke—her body language struggling to shrug off the shame of having to subject a four-year-old to this.

In DC and many other urban districts around the nation, one’s race, class, and income determines whether metal detectors are used in one’s school. Students attending Sidwell Friends, Georgetown Visitation, St. Albans, or the National Cathedral School are simply free to walk in the doors without suspicion or incident.

The same is true for students attending public schools in many of the DC suburban counties, including Montgomery County. It is the policy of DC Public Schools that all students attending any district public high school or middle school go through security every morning before being allowed to attend class; no exceptions.

Year after year we come face to face with the talking orifice of urban district superintendents and chancellors, spewing gibberish about how they believe their students are no different than students attending private schools.

But none of them are ever willing to put their school safety policies where their mouths are. The institutional predisposition that all black kids in the inner-city are so violent and capricious that they must be searched and checked feverishly once they enter the school door, while white kids across the city lines are so well-reasoned and calm that they can simply walk in and take a seat, seems at the very least, institutionally racist.

Last year, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Annenberg Institute at Brown University issued a study entitled “Safety with Dignity: Alternatives to Over-Policing Schools.” In it, they examined some six NYC public schools with “at-risk”(aka black and latino) student populations that do not use metal detectors. The study found that those schools had less instances of suspension, dramatically fewer incidents (criminal or non-criminal), and better attendance and graduation rates than schools equipped with metal detectors. The study also concluded that there were more NYPD officers in NYC schools than there were police officers on the streets of Baltimore, Boston, or DC.

There is no doubt that school safety is a serious matter—one that is essential for maintaining the protection of students and faculty, and furthering the integrity of the learning process. But having a different set of safety standards based solely on race, class, and income is nothing short of unjust.

Surely if one group of students is only permitted to receive its right to an education after it faces the scrutiny of a security protocol, then all students must be subject to this same scrutiny and protocol—that is if we truly believe all of our students are equal.

As it appears, it would seem that if our students are made to feel like criminals at the very entrance of the school building—scanned from the pony tail down, patted beneath the waist, having their food confiscated as if they were suspected terrorists boarding a US airline, we have already decided, before they even pick up their No. 2 pencils, that they will be prisoners.

So much for taking attendance.

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