After stabbing death, answer call for change

Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

•••

A St. Paul teenager has lost his life — this time in the middle of the day, inside his own high school and allegedly at the hands of a fellow student.

St. Paul police responded just before noon Friday to Harding High School on the city's East Side. A boy had been stabbed; he later died, and a 16-year-old suspect was arrested. Police confirmed that both the alleged assailant and the victim, identified Monday as 10th-grader Devin Scott, were Harding students.

The community is left reeling — grieving the terrible loss, asking why, trying to work through the trauma and pain. Harding remained closed on Monday and Tuesday and school authorities are responding with resources to help. In heartbreaking media interviews, some students have shared that they are increasingly feeling unsafe at school.

Questions rightly abound about what can and must be done to prevent such horrific events from being repeated.

Some are asking whether St. Paul and other school districts should reconsider decisions they previously made about school resource officers (SROs) at high schools. St. Paul and Minneapolis schools stopped using sworn officers as SROs in 2020 after George Floyd was killed and instead have deployed school liaison workers for security.

But one thing that is different with a sworn officer on site is that the police response can be faster when an incident like this occurs and law enforcement must be called.

It does seem likely, meanwhile, that a stabbing death might not have happened inside the building if no one were able to bring a metal weapon inside in the first place. That raises the question of metal detectors at school entrances and perhaps even more restrictive policies about which of the many doors to a school can be open.

Some find it bothersome and intrusive to go through security and detectors when attending a sports event or boarding a plane — but the process has become a normal and necessary feature of life in a more dangerous world. Metal detectors in schools should be among several options under discussion to make schools safer.

Policymakers should also be discussing better communication and coordination between the places where young people gather and violence prevention programs and interventions. Those and other ideas are part of recently introduced safe-schools legislation that would increase funding for security, drug-abuse prevention and cybersecurity.

To be sure, the death of a student inside a school is rare. A district spokesperson said over the weekend that there is no record of a student previously being killed inside a St. Paul public school. Yet just a few weeks ago, a student was shot in the head at a rec center across the street from Central High School. Two days later a bullet grazed a staff member at Washington High outside the building.