WS/FCS teachers tasked with searching student bags say it will harm their relationships

Some Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools teachers have concerns about a new plan to increase the random use of metal detectors in high schools.

But the problem isn’t the metal detectors themselves, according to a few teachers from Mount Tabor High School. It’s the fact that instructors will often be the ones checking students with a wand, and searching their bags for weapons with limited training. 

Meredith Wooten is an English teacher at Mount Tabor. She’s been there for 17 years.

“A lot of times, I am the counselor, the nurse, you know, whatever I can do to help these kids. We're helping feed them and take care of them," Wooten said. "I don't want to police them too.”

Tonya Dorman is in her 28th year of teaching at Mount Tabor and also takes issue with this new responsibility. 

"I have concerns that yet again, the school system is asking teachers to complete a task, be assigned a duty, that is not related to the teaching of students," she said in an email. "I am trained in education, I am not trained in security." 

Both teachers worry that this will break the trust they’ve built with students who confide in them about sensitive issues. 

“If I become the one who is policing them, they're going to stop giving me that information because that puts me on the opposite side of them," Wooten said. "And that makes my job so much harder.”

According to Chief Safety, Security & Emergency Management Officer Jonathan Wilson, that’s not the district’s intent. 

“I don't ever want to put a student and a staff member in an adversarial role or adversarial relationship," Wilson said. "And so that is definitely not the intent. It is a way to build relationships. It is a way to own this together.”

He said staff members could take this as an opportunity to engage with students and talk about school safety, which is a message Dorman said she'd been told too.

"I meet and greet my students at my door every day," she said in an email. "I build relationships with students every time I can. However, in a matter as serious as school safety, I am tasked with a responsibility that goes beyond my comfort level, expertise and training."

Wilson said the training for staff members isn't "in-depth," but also that it doesn't have to be. 

"Opening a bag and looking into it, you know, there's not a whole lot of training in that," Wilson said. 

He said teachers would not be expected to be the ones to confiscate weapons. If something were to be found, he said law enforcement officers and school administrators would intervene. 

"We don't want a teacher or custodian or whoever might be working a metal detection station that day, to be reaching into a bag and removing a weapon," Wilson said. 

Legally, Wilson said teachers are allowed to search students’ bags. But if a staff member isn’t comfortable with that, he suggested they ask their principal for a different role. 

Amy Diaz covers education for WFDD in partnership with Report For America. You can follow her on Twitter at @amydiaze.