It’s a question we ask ourselves entirely too often in response to the latest tragic event at an American school: How do we keep our students safe?

School violence itself is nothing new. It has existed as long as kids have been grouped together to learn. But the last 30 years seem to have seen a dramatic surge in not just the number of violent events at schools around the nation, but in the severity of the incidents – with guns almost always playing a central role.

In the last two weeks, we have seen two concerning situations play out involving schools in the Vicksburg Warren School District. Thankfully, no one was hurt in either circumstance. In fact, the first incident turned out to not be an actual incident at all. Rather, a “not credible” threat was made over Instagram and hinted at a shooting taking place at a junior high school, Vicksburg Police Department said.

The second incident involved an elementary school student bringing a pellet gun to a school bus stop. We don’t know much else, due mostly to the student’s age, but we do know the student had already been suspended from school.

In both cases, we reached out to officials with both the school district and local law enforcement. And in both cases, they said protocols were followed and the situations were either brought under control quickly, or quickly deemed not credible. Once the details of the situations became public, plenty of parents were concerned about not just what had taken place, but how it had been handled. That’s completely understandable. I have two school-aged children myself and I absolutely want to know what is being done to protect them while they are in the care of school officials.

So, is what’s being done enough? Is anything ever really enough? I was a sophomore in high school when Columbine happened and it was the first time I remember a school shooting causing a national reaction. It’s unfortunately happened many times since. But, I recall my school district quickly moving to school uniforms as part of the “answer” to the problem of securing our campus from people who didn’t belong. There were a few problems with that line of thinking, not the least of which was that the people who killed students at Columbine were also students. They did belong there. 

The point is, there doesn’t seem to be a clear-cut set of rules for handling dangers on our campuses. Metal detectors are certainly a good idea, but what about kids on buses who haven’t made it to campus yet? School uniforms do actually help single out people who shouldn’t be on campus, except for the fact that every clothing store located in a school district that enforces uniforms sells the nondescript clothing, which has the unintended side effect of making someone who isn’t a student look more like one.

In our case, even with neither of the recent events leading to injury, VPD Chief Penny Jones said extra officers would be added to existing school resource officers for the foreseeable future, just to be safe. Meanwhile, VWSD Superintendent Dr. Tori Holloway said the protocols in place worked well in both circumstances, even though they were wildly different matters to deal with.

That’s all good news, but with threats to our students now coming from the void of cyberspace being just as worthy of investigation as any other, it seems we need to be adapting our safety protocols as much as those who could inflict harm have adapted their methods. What that looks like may take all of us to figure out.

Blake Bell is the general manager and executive editor of The Vicksburg Post. He can be reached at blake.bell@vicksburgpost.com.