Editorial: Searches for weapons are a welcome response to campus violence

When a school fight leads to ten arrests and serious injuries to a city police officer, it’s not so much as brawl as a riot.   

And when that sort of chaos occurs, we want to see effective reaction from the folks in charge.

The brawl at East Baton Rouge Readiness Superintendent’s Academy, a school for students with disciplinary issues, has sparked a reaction from the parish school system.

System leaders told parents that they’ll be conducting unannounced searches for drugs and weapons. Every middle and high school may be searched, a spokesman said.

The searches will be conducted with law enforcement personnel and trained dogs who are part of K9 units and will occur on a regular basis.

That’s a change from the previous practice of much more rarely searching campuses, typically on an as-needed basis — when events like the Superintendent’s Academy riot occur, for example.

We support the policy of actively seeking to suppress both illegal drug use and particularly weapons that in a volatile situation — or even in a small schoolyard scuffle — can be deadly.

Youth is a parlous state, by definition, so weapons clearly should be the priority for searches. Yet Superintendent Sito Narcisse is surely correct that problems outside the schools are part of this challenge. He’s working with city and parish officials on the issue, and that’s wise.

But before something worse happens than the brawl at Superintendent’s Academy, the searches are clearly needed.