Editorial: The most dangerous game

The school year is coming to an end for seniors at Lower Merion, and as the shadow of graduation looms over the class of ’23, students are opting for childhood games as a way to stay connected as the promise of “the rest of our lives” slowly pulls them apart. Phone tag with potential prom dates, hide-and-seek with teachers on test days, and, most importantly, the time-old tradition of Senior Assassin (a game which is, under no circumstances, being played by LM’s Seniors.) Many schools have banned the strategic game of water tag, citing safety concerns over the presence of anything gun-related on campuses. This has led these games to be played entirely off campus, or in LM’s case, avoided altogether.

There is something to be noted, however, about the voluntary nature of the game. In order to play, you not only become a sort of prey, you too have to take on the role of an assassin. You have to arm yourself with a water-carrying vessel of your choice and actively try to “shoot” your target before the round is over. Everyone involved consents to the risks of being someone else’s target, whether this means classmates in your bushes, under your car, or on the prowl at random times of the day. It makes sense why schools don’t want something so competitive and intense in a place of education. Students shouldn’t feel distracted by the fear of getting “shot” by anyone, at any time, without any means to effectively defend themselves.

It feels ironic that our schools, despite being safe havens from fake guns, aren’t nearly as safeguarded against real ones.

Last month, the school administration issued a school-wide announcement of new safety policies. These included the locking and disuse of side and back doors, the implementation of sign-in sheets for students entering the office past 7:30 AM, and most disruptively, the absolute prohibition of student parking in the 2-hour street sections adjacent to campus. Despite the appearance of a dramatic shift towards authoritative action, these measures to reduce the amount of students who leave and re-enter the buildings during the school day go relatively unenforced. They seem to mildly inconvenience the majority of driving students who didn’t end up getting a parking pass, but when it comes to safety, the difference feels negligible, especially as other “blind spots” go unattended. These measures don’t protect entry via the largest point of vulnerability for students during the school day: the traffic between the Chem building and the main office in between classes. Once overheard by an opinions editor was a conversation by two Class of ’25 Freshmen, who scoffed at the new attempts at increasing security on campus: “Everyone knows if there was gonna be a shooter, they’d just come in with the kids from the Chem building.” It’s a relatively well-established truth among students that the minutes in between classes breeds a sort of group anonymity, which provides a sort of direct “in” to the school.

These safety concerns are only exacerbated as gun ownership has too increased dramatically in the years post-Covid, with one out of every five American households having purchased a gun between March 2020 to March 2022. Despite the brief decline experienced when schools went fully virtual, school shootings have returned with a renewed frequency; surpassing pre-pandemic levels. With this too comes a renewed importance that LM listens to its students when it comes to safety. While the ACES mantras covered in this school year’s inaugural editorial focus on the responsibility that students have toward keeping each other safe, they also reinforce the detrimental notion that students are to be held primarily accountable when issues of safety arise. When a fight breaks out, it is almost always seen as a reflection of the student body, and therefore, it becomes our problem to fix. Conflicts on campus and threats of violence often get reduced to issues of poor behavior or a lack of respect for authority, rather than incidents indicative of the antagonistic conditions that thrive in a high schools across the country. Sure, there is fault to be had with individual students, but displacing blame onto students for the actions of their peers is not only ineffective as a prevention method, but corrosive to the foundations necessary to build a strong school community. It is inevitable, as a public school in the U.S., that there will be shooting threats. The number of serious gun scares that have occurred in the district over the past 5 years cannot be counted on two hands. It’s foolish to pretend as though this is not the reality of schooling in America. There is no reason for email templates to circulate instructing students how to report their concerns; but this is the reality of schooling in America. Instead of accepting actionless platitudes about a safer future we aren’t taking any tangible steps towards, we should learn from the mistakes already made, whether by LM’s administration in response to community concern, or in more severe incidents across the country that have ended in lives lost.

Unsigned editorials reflect the general opinion of the many staff members and not the opinion of any single editor.

Articles and letters featured in the Opinions section refect the viewpoints of individual contributors and not neccesarily those of The Merionite editorial staf.