Michigan School District bans backpacks due to safety concerns

Hanging from the back of a door in a Flint, Michigan home is a black Trailmaker backpack that belongs to Jaxon Williams, a third grader at Freeman Elementary. It hasn’t been moved in almost a week.

“It’s officially retired, just like a sweater,” said his mother, Ladel Lewis, a local councillor.

That’s because Jaxon and more than 2,800 other students on 11 campuses in the Flint Community Schools are subject to a backpacking ban that began this week after district officials were alarmed by threats to student safety. In any case, it will remain in force until the end of the school year in mid-June.

After the first week under the ban, Dr. Lewis and other parents in the district expressed frustration and skepticism, saying determined students would carry guns under their clothes. Some experts also question the effectiveness of such bans.

The ban, which allows purse-sized bags, came less than two weeks after a security threat led to the closure of a high school in the district for two days. At a special meeting of the Flint Board of Education, educators expressed growing concerns about school safety following a series of school shootings across the country, including one in Oxford, Michigan, a community about 30 miles outside of Flint, where a student was shot and killed four high school classmates in 2021.

Younger children have also brought guns to school. In January, a 6-year-old first grader in Newport News, Virginia, shot his teacher with a gun.

“In my 15 years of service here at Flint Community Schools, I have never felt the way I feel now,” Ernest Steward, the district director of student services, said at the rally.

Concerns about Mr. Steward’s safety are justified, said Justin Heinze, an educational psychologist at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health who focuses on preventing school violence.

“There is no denying that the number of shootings and the severity of shootings are increasing” in schools, Dr Heinze said.

a Report 2022 from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics recorded a total of 93 school shootings during the 2020-21 school year, the highest since 2000-01.

About 3 percent of kindergarten through 12th grade students bring a gun to school in any given year, said Dr. Heinze.

During the board meeting on April 25, Mr. Steward recommended not using backpacks for at least the rest of the academic year.

The threat to the high school was “just one incident of ongoing issues we’ve had this year around students bringing guns in backpacks into our buildings,” he said. He added that the district had banned backpacks in the past.

As escalating gun violence continues to devastate American classrooms and the president himself declared himself powerless to prevent it, a patchwork of simple measures, including policies that mandate clear backpacks or ban them altogether, have taken on greater significance.

Backpack bans have recently been rolled out in other communities, including one introduced this week at an elementary school in Ocala, Florida, after a student brought in a toy gun that looked real, a district spokesman said.

In a letter dated April 27 announcement of the new policywrote Kevelin Jones, the superintendent in Flint, that “backpacks make it easier for students to conceal weapons, which can be disassembled and are more difficult to identify or conceal,” but that “clear backpacks don’t completely solve this problem.”

“By banning backpacks altogether and adding an increased security presence throughout the district, we can better control what enters our buildings,” he wrote.

Dr. Heinze said there wasn’t much evidence to support it either ban backpacks or mandate clear backpacks, noting that only a handful of studies in the past 20 years had examined the issue in depth.

Dr. Lewis wondered why the ban was necessary for elementary school students. She said she stopped sending Jaxon to school with a notebook, folder, and clean clothes for his after-school activities.

Chloe Combs, an eighth grader at Holmes STEM Academy in Flint, has been bringing her lunch to school every day since kindergarten, her mother, Sherese Combs, said. On Monday, Chloe, 14, switched from a backpack with enough room for a lunch bag and water bottle to a miniature backpack, the size of a small purse, that fits only in a smaller lunch container. She can’t take that much food, Mrs. Combs said, “but she’ll manage.”

Ms. Combs stressed that parents need to do more to ensure that their children do not bring guns to school. She expressed disappointment over a violent clash between two parents while picking up students at a nearby charter school, in which the state police said one woman shot another.

“The only time I feel comfortable is when she comes home from school,” Mrs. Combs said of Chloe. “It’s just really stressful.”