Caution and care necessary for safe classrooms

Editorial: There is no reason a child shouldn't feel safe at school. Both locally and statewide, we've recently seen an increased emphasis on student safety with more headlines dedicated to school violence.
Earlier this month, the senate passed a bill that would require schools to have emergency drills to account for active shooter situations. Our local districts already have made efforts to have such plans in place.
In last week's issue of the Chronicle, Hampton-Dumont Middle School detailed steps to address social and emo-tional learning and ensure students are getting the help they need for issues they might face outside of the classroom. This not only helps students feel safe and secure at school, but also identifies behavioral, social and mental health issues that may have gone otherwise un-detected.
In an ideal world, we would not have to worry about a student's safety at school. Schools should be a place of safety and comfort. Students should be able to learn, make friends and thrive in a school environment. But with more instances of active shooters and an increased knowledge that students are not getting the mental health resources they need, schools must be prepared to look fur-ther than just math and sci-ence. The goal of school, at its very core, is to educate students. That education must also include the knowledge needed to be safe and help others feel safe as well.
We might not live in an ideal world, but there is en-couragement in schools' pro-activity to make it as good of a world as possible for students.