A reader in Austin, Texas, writes:
Here in Texas, almost every school has unsightly, cheap, moldy
portable buildings. Because of our portables, my school has six
exterior doors open during the school day! That means anyone from off
the streets could walk into our school. Sure, we have security in
place at the front office, but what good does that do when our
building is so open and exposed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And yet Texas spends billions on standardized tests produced by Pearson Publishing…….
Marge
A caval donato non si guarda in bocca!
Marge
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Here in NYC, many of our students are also in trailers. And they are unprotected. Blogger Pissed Off Teacher wrote about her experience trying to get a guard for the trailers in “Packemin High”. The principal didn’t want to do it, and not every one in the staff backed her up. But she got it done. Not every school has taken that precaution. And while NYC schools have “safety plans”, I am sure they will have to be revisited.
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What a hideous truth. Our elementary campus here in Austin, Texas is littered with more than 20 broken-down, 20 year-old portable buildings that don’t have any sort of security system.
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I have often wondered why I have to step out of my classroom, onto an open walkway, to lock the classroom’s door. (Florida)
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Teachers need to protect the classroom. My daughter is a Special Ed Facilitator, I would want her to have a gun. Outlaw the guns and the outlaws will be the only ones that have them…
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that is an incredibly STUPID thing to say..sorry to come off rude but you can’t seriously expect an educator who went to college to teach kids to pack heat while teaching? i can imagine a 3rd grade hugging a teacher and the gun going off.
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My curremt classroom is a modular. We still don’t have a security gate up. A few weeks ago, I saw some students tugging on a security door to the main building, and it popped open. I alerted our building engineer, but that still doesn’t make my situation more secure Oh yeah, a month or so ago, we were on lockdown because of an armed robber in the neighborhood. Safe, I can only hope so.
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My school has 15 portables.
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Remember the “Texas Miracle”? Apparently in the rush to get ‘miracle’ test results they forgot that they were incentivizing [this is where a business term makes sense] cheating and teaching to the test, while neglecting supposedly unimportant things like school safety, counselors, and school psychologists.
Talk about misplaced priorities!
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My school in Utah has 6 portables. I am in one, and we could easily be trapped should the unthinkable happen. It’s haunted me for a long time, and now it haunts me even further.
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