Study Finds Metal Detectors More Common in High-Minority Schools

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Eighth graders join hands with classmates during “circle time” this month in Tracy Hauser’s homeroom class at City Springs Elementary School, a P-8 charter school in Baltimore. Circle time, during which students and their teachers discuss issues of concern, is part of a holistic approach to violence prevention the school has been using for the past two years.

—Matt Roth for Education Week

Minority pupils more likely to face metal detectors

By Sarah D. Sparks

Minority students in a high-poverty neighborhood are more likely to pass through a metal detector on the way to class than their better-off and white peers are, even if the schools are equally safe, according to new research.

Researchers at the University of Delaware and the University of California, Irvine, based their findings on a study  of nationally representative school data. They presented the study Aug. 20 at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, held in Las Vegas.

Security measures adopted from the criminal-justice arena—from metal detectors and surveillance cameras to full-time guards and drug-sniffing dogs—have proliferated in the past decade or so, particularly in secondary schools. Yet, even after accounting for the levels of crime on schools’ campuses and in the surrounding neighborhoods, the researchers found that high-poverty schools were disproportionately likely to use such security mechanisms, and that the racial makeup of the student enrollment was a powerful predictor of whether the school.