Drug and weapons free schools---not likely with the new laws!

School principals are gnashing their teeth at the latest announcement that searching student’s bags for drugs and other things is going to be almost impossible. How on earth are schools going to be able to monitor what comes and goes in school bags if they haven’t got that very sensible right?

Any school, not just lower decile schools will have students on a given day with stuff in their bags that will either make others or themselves unsafe. Those who say this is untrue just have their heads in the sand. For some schools of course the problems are huge.

Students bring drugs, alcohol and weapons. If you work with kids and talk to teachers in a range of schools you will know what I mean. Students tell us they feel unsafe on the way to school and sadly sometimes within our schools. Basically they are arming themselves, with knives and occasionally something more sinister.

Drug taking is endemic with a small proportion of our students and they are often ‘high’ in our classes. Most go under the radar but a sizeable proportion are simply not learning because of their altered state. Ask many teachers and once again, they could tell you horror stories. Taking away the right of schools to search bags is going to make this problem even worse.

Some schools employ the use of drug dogs but this has very limited effect because the word gets around in seconds that such dogs are ‘in school.’ With most students having cell phones, it is a no brainer to think that information won’t flow.

So to the idiots who advised the Government to make these changes and therefore make our schools less safe, I say---‘what planet are you on?’ To the way-out thinkers, divorced from reality and who worry about student rights, I say---‘get real and help us work towards safer schools, not ones where students are able to bring whatever trey wish into our schools, making them places of ‘not learning.’

OH---The Government says that schools can still search lockers and student desks.’ For God’s sake! ---- How many schools have lockers or desks with lids now? We are served by a Government that listens to advisers who are so far off the mark that one wonders what they will come up with next. Hell, how on earth did a ‘National’ Government get to this stage? They have completely flipped. I could have understood if it was the Greens who had proposed all this. We are indeed living in a crazy world.