Monday, March 4, 2013
Many district budgets don't have room for special school resource officers (SROs). Should administrators make room at schools instead for regular police officers?
Converting a school classroom or storage room into a police department office—is that a good way to make schools more secure? Since the economic recession arrived in 2009, many school districts have cut school resource officers (SROs), leaving school builldings without day-in, day-out police presence, according to the Star Tribune. But the mass-shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT, brought calls for more armed security, including police, at schools. One school district, in Jordan, MN, has opted to find space in its buildings to house some of the regular functions of the city's police department, the Associated Press reported.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek: “The severely mentally ill should never have access to guns. We have an epidemic of untreated mental illness in the U.S. and right here in Minnesota.”
The following was released by the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office: Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek, the Minnesota Sheriffs’ Association, Hennepin County Judge Jay Quam and a coalition of community partners that included advocates for the mentally ill and state lawmakers gathered in St. Paul Wednesday to discuss potential reforms to address concerns about the role of mental illness and extreme gun violence. Among the proposed reforms: strengthen existing gun background check laws, provide greater access to mental health records for law enforcement and address gaps in providing services and resources to Minnesotans who live with untreated mental illness. “We have an access problem,” said Sheriff Stanek, “The severely mentally ill …
Monday, December 24, 2012
Rev. Rolf Olson of Richfield Lutheran Church says the belief by some that the school shooting resulted from "taking God out of schools" is unfounded.
In the days following the horrific Newtown school tragedy, discussions of gun control and school security to mental illness and warning signs of a killer ran rampant across the country. Everyone was just trying to make sense of it all. Of course, God's role was also questioned. The following was written on the Facebook page of Golden Valley-based Spirit of Hope United Methodist Church by local pastor, Rev. Rolf Olson, of Richfield Evangelical Lutheran Church. He too knows the pain of having a child murdered and addresses arguments surrounding God in schools: THE TRAGEDY AND GOD In the days since the tragedy and evil that befell Newtown, I have heard and read comments about the event occurring because "they have taken God out of the schools…
Heretical1
12:40 pm on Friday, March 8, 2013
Speaking from having grown up while attending Edina public schools, it is important to know the nuanced differences in its "institutional cultural complexion", comparatively; i.e., that set of the attitudes, values, beliefs, norms, mores, stresses, conflicts, and other differential "behavior drivers" that are likely to beget criminal or otherwise deleterious and disruptive acting out by troubled … more ›