Barrow journal (Winder, Ga.) 2008-2016, May 14, 2014, Image 4

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Newspaper Page TextPAGE 4A BARROW JOURNAL WEDNESDAY, MAY 14, 2014 Opinions “Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent. ” ~ Henry Ward Beecher - our views Simple things in life How to deal with kids crying Svolf?’ THE RECENT spate of bomb threats in local public schools has put both parents and school officials on edge. Students, how ever, seem to be enjoying the confusion, taking time to do “selfies” as they parade into the spring sunshine for an evacuation. Based on the comments to our websites, there appear to be a wide range of views about who should be held accountable for these instances. Some have been critical of local law enforcement; others have been upset with how school officials have handled the threats; a few people have called for put ting “prayer back in school;” many have put the blame on slack parents. “Kids are given no consequences at home, so they think there are none in life,” said one commentator. This is a difficult issue, almost a perfect storm of public policy, emotions and youthful stupidity. Finger pointing is to be expected. Let’s break this down for discussion: • Several dozen high-profile incidents of mass violence on school campuses in recent decades has hyper-sensitized our society to the prospect of children being the victim of carnage in a school. Yet there have been relatively few instances of bombs being detonated on a school campus. The worst such event didn’t happen recently, as some might expect, but rather took place in 1927 when a disgruntled school board member set off an explosion in a school in Michigan that killed 38 elementary students and six adults. Several other bombings at other schools over the years were also done by adults and not students. Mass violence on school campuses has mostly come from firearms, not bombs. • The reaction by school districts to these incidents of campus violence led to extreme school policies that were wrong headed. Reports of young children being expelled from school for such things as mak ing a mock pistol with their fingers created a backlash against school officials who over reacted with inane zero-tolerance policies. The image of school officials being unable to distinguish real threats from silliness has tainted all school officials to some extent and undermined parental respect for school leaders in general. • If some school officials have lost per spective, so too have many parents. Some parents have come to demand that schools solve all of their children’s problems. They expect teachers and school officials to give them personal phone calls about every thing going on at a school; they want to be spoon fed information rather than making an effort to find out what’s going on themselves. In addition, some communities face serious problems of massive drug use in homes where parents neglect their children’s edu cational needs. School officials have increasingly pushed back against these pressures and now more openly blame bad par enting for a lack of educational success in public schools. There appears to be a wider gap of trust between parents and school leaders today than in the past. • If there is a growing trust gap between school leaders and parents, it’s being fed by cultural changes that tend to look for drama in everyday life. Especially here in the South, personal conflict, gossip and drama is celebrated by many adults whose lives seem to revolve around such shallowness. Social media, such as Facebook, has given the drama queens (and kings) of the world a new forum through which to showcase their immaturity. • Kids, of course, are all about drama. They, too, now have social media through which to cultivate their own adolescent drama before a wide audience. Many of the current bomb threats were undoubtedly copycat productions fed by the social media spotlight. • While kids may be immature, they aren’t stupid. They see how these kinds of actions yank the chains of those in authority over them — parents and school officials. They see how parents over-react by rush ing to schools and acting hysterical both in person and online. And they see how they’re able to manipulate school officials by disrupting class schedules and forcing the adults around them to react. So the question is, what is the best way to deal with these kinds of situations? On the one hand, school leaders feel tremendous liability and pressure to always react to any perceived threat, no matter how remote it may be. The safety of school children and employees is paramount, as it should be. Yet “reacting” is exactly what the purvey ors of these events want. So in evacuating at every threat, no matter how remote, schools feed the drama they’re seeking to quell. Interestingly, the recent bomb threats here were not typical. Most of the time, bomb threats to schools are phoned in; but these local instances were written on bathroom walls. Law enforcement manuals on these kinds of threats go into great detail about how to evaluate a threat and rank it by seriousness. Perhaps rather than automatically evacuating a school at every threat, a local law enforce ment official trained in the psychology of threats should be called in to evaluate them on a case-by-case basis and then advise the school whether or not an evacuation is warranted. Of course, that takes time and there is a lot of pressure for school officials to act quickly. Still, there may be instances where a quick evacuation would make students less safe than if they were to stay in place inside the school building. In one national case several years ago, a bomb threat was called in to a school to force an evacuation so that a waiting student- shooter would have his targets outside the building. Bad things do happen. A few years ago, a student wearing a live bomb walked into Jackson County Comprehensive High School. Fortunately, nobody got hurt, but it was a dangerous situation. And some school districts are infested with gangs that carry out violent attacks on school grounds. Still, most students are probably in more danger riding in a car on the way to school than they are inside a school building. And the real threats they face in life probably won’t be written on a bathroom wall. There are no easy answers to any of this. There is no way to make schools 100 percent safe, just as there is no way to make any place 100 percent safe. We can build tall fences around schools, put in metal detectors, arm the halls with police and never let students outside on play grounds or athletic fields where those with harmful intent can reach them. But then we would no longer have a school — we would have a prison. We all have to accept some level of risk every day when we get out of bed and go about our lives. Schools are no different; there will always be risks and there will always be immature kids whose pranks feed on those fears. Perhaps if we — parents and school lead ers — would turn down the volume on the drama that surrounds all of this, it would dissipate from a lack of interest. When parents act hysterical at every perceived threat no matter how remote, and when schools overreact to kids crying “wolf,” kids will continue to cry “wolf” just to see the drama unfold. Mike Buffington is co-publisher of Mainstreet Newspapers, Inc. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com. mike buffington Who will be the winner on primary election night? BY TOM CRAWFORD IN JUST one more week, Georgia will hold its earliest pri mary election ever and finally give a definitive answer on the race everybody is watching, the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. The recent polls have estab lished some clear trend lines as to which GOP candidates may advance to the expected runoff election. Businessman David Perdue has been running in first place, but his support has fluctuated below the 30 percent level. U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston of Savannah and former secretary of state Karen Handel appear to be bat tling for the second spot in that July 22 runoff. U.S. Rep. Paul Broun of Athens, who’s always had problems rais ing money has settled back into fourth place, while Rep. Phil Gingrey of Cobb County has dropped to fifth place in most recent polls. These trends suggest it will be Perdue facing either Kingston or Handel in a hellacious runoff election. But if there’s one lesson we should have learned about Georgia politics, it is that polls in a primary campaign can be very unreliable. To illustrate, we need look no farther back than the Republican primary in the governor’s race four years ago. In that governor’s race, as in this Senate race, there were five credible Republican candi dates: Handel, Deal, Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, former legislator Eric Johnson and state Rep. Jeff Chapman of Brunswick. In that race, as in this Senate race, you also had a variety of polls being released in the final days leading up to the primary election. For months in 2010, the poll results kept telling us that Oxendine, a highly controversial insurance commissioner for 16 years, was leading that primary and seemed to be the most likely nominee to run against former governor Roy Barnes in the gen eral election. I’m not talking about dubious surveys conducted by sloppy polling firms, either. These included polls commissioned by the state’s largest newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on behalf of a consortium of Georgia newspapers that paid big bucks for the survey numbers. Just six days prior to the pri mary election, the Journal- Constitution released a poll showing Oxendine in first place with 31 percent among likely Republican primary voters, with Handel at 23 percent and Deal at 18 percent. The executives at Cox Enterprises must have had some suspicions about those numbers, because their polling firm was immediately sent back into the field to conduct a second state wide survey. Those results came out three days before the elec tion and showed that Handel was in first place with 29 percent support, followed by Oxendine at 22 percent and Deal at 20 percent. When the primary ballots were actually counted, Handel finished in first place with Deal making it into the runoff with her. Oxendine, the leader in so many pre-election polls, finished in fourth place and out of the running. It’s hard to imagine how polls so massive and expensive, conducted for the state’s larg est newspaper, could have got ten it so wrong. These polls not only projected a candidate in the runoff who missed the run off completely (Oxendine), they also did not include in the runoff the candidate who actually won the election for governor (Deal). I bring up these results to poke a little fun at the Journal- Constitution, which takes itself far too seriously as a purveyor of “exclusive” journalistic scoops. But I also want to make a use ful point: primary elections are very difficult to poll accurately because voter turnout is so vola tile. The primaries next Tuesday could attract as few as 20 per cent or as many as 30 percent of the state’s registered voters. With that kind of volatility in turnout, surprises can happen - just ask John Oxendine. It may be, as the polls are sug gesting, that Perdue will actually finish first in next week’s ballot ing. It is also a possibility that Broun could come back from his fourth place position and make it into a July 22 runoff election. We may even find out that there are thousands of Gingrey support ers that the polls are somehow missing. Who knows for sure? The actual voting on May 20 will tell us whether any of these polls were accurate. That uncertainty is what makes elections so much fun to watch. Tom Crawford is editor of The Georgia Report. He can be reached at tcrawford@gareport. com. The Barrow Journal Winder, Barrow County, Ga. www. Barrow J oumal .com Mike Buffington Co-Publisher Scott Buffington Co-Publisher Chris Bridges Editor Susan Norman Government News Editor Jessica Brown Photographer Susan Treadwell Reporter Alex Pace Reporter Susan Mobley Office Manager Jeremy Ginn Marketing Manager POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: The Barrow Journal, 77 East May Street, Winder, Georgia 30680 Published 52 times per year by Mainstreet Newspapers, Inc. Periodicals Postage Paid at Winder, Ga. Email: news@barrowjournal.com Phone: 770-867-NEWS (6397) Fax: 678-425-1435 SUBSCRIPTIONS: $25.00/yr. IS IT TRUE that you enjoy the smaller things in life more the older you get? It seems that is the case. Recently I found myself enjoying the simple joy of having a blue sky above with plenty of warmth and sunshine. Seems Old Man Winter’s grip from recent months has finally disap peared. As a child, we really don’t notice things like the cold or the sun. If it’s cold or rain ing so be it. If it’s a clear day, that’s great too. It isn’t until we get older that we begin to appreciate little things that as children we so often took for granted. It probably has something to do with the fact that as adults our lives are filled with more stress. From work to bills to countless other responsibilities, we can’t help but feel bothered when the small things we take pleasure in are taken away, even for a little while. It’s those things which help us get through the winter blues and sprint full- speed into spring. Some of the things which are no longer taken for granted from my perspective include: • Birds singing in the backyard after we take more food and water to them. Their bright colors are always pleasing to the eye along with their constant singing. •A peaceful weekend after a hectic week at work. • Talks with an old friend and how you realize that even though your childhoods were years — decades — ago, that those events of yesterday are only a conversa tion away. • The closeness of your co-workers and realizing your life wouldn’t be the same without them on a daily basis. •The times when the power bill is opened and my heart doesn’t stop for a moment. •An afternoon nap. •The fact that there are a few people left who know the difference between a television news anchor or reporter and a slanted talk show host. •Memories of newspaper columns by Lewis Grizzard and Celestine Sibley and Furman Bisher. •When the auto repair shop tells me that nothing needs working on under the hood. • The enjoyment of holding a new book in your hands and beginning the process once again of discovering the contents within. • A time when it was not necessary for 90 percent of drivers you see to be talking on a cell phone. Are those conversations really that important? •How an old movie or an old song can take you back to the year they were released. • The site of an old barn in a field that can still be seen from time to time off the highway. There’s one not far from where I live and I always make a note to glance over at it. • Memories of the Steelers and Cowboys meeting in the Super Bowl back during the 70s. More focus was on the game then and not all the hype and hoopla. •Those friends who check in on you daily. Yes, it’s easier to do with e-mail, texting and such, but knowing someone thinks enough of you to do so does mean a great deal. • For the times when the phone doesn’t ring in the middle of the night or very early in the morning. We all know it usually is not good news at those hours. • Those who have guided us, influenced us and encouraged us during our adven tures in life. From family members to friends, we should never take anyone we care about for granted. Nothing is guaran teed in life from one week to the next or one day to the next. It’s why we should all be thankful for those little things which make life more enjoyable. Chris Bridges is editor of the Barrow Journal. You can reach him at cbridges@ barrowjournal. com.

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Barrow journal (Winder, Ga.) 2008-2016, May 14, 2014, Image 4