Currently, Hayes is undergoing many changes due to recently passed legislation, including the enacted Senate Bill 104 that limits where students may use the restroom to their assigned sex at birth.
Subsequently, staff members are encouraging students to use the Rowland Center bathrooms in hopes that allowing students to use gender-neutral bathrooms will serve as a loophole to what the Senate Bill proposed.
Another law that schools are required to follow goes into effect on April 9 is the Parents’ Bill of Rights. This requires schools to update their curriculum policies surrounding sexual content and requires staff members to tell students’ parents about mental, physical, or emotional health changes they are aware of. Staff are also required to not withhold any name or pronoun changes along with the sexual orientation of a student from their parents.
The Parents’ Bill of Rights also requires schools to adopt a religious release policy excusing students out of school for religious instruction. While religious education and expression are important, they shouldn’t be first on the list of laws passed into school systems when there are more pressing issues, such as school safety, specifically surrounding gun violence.
With set knowledge of how the teachers and staff will help comply with these new bills, it’s about time legislators start also conversing on how to better the safety precautions at their school.
Improving safety precautions around schools should be a main priority of legislators, before their petty policies.
Late last month, a firearm made its way into Hayes. “We were alerted to a concern that a student at the high school may have a weapon in their possession. The high school team conducted a search and found a firearm in the student’s backpack,” said Hayes Principal Rex Reeder in the email sent out to parents that evening.
What’s next? How do elected officials have enough power to place legislation to prohibit phones in schools but not focus on the many cases of school violence that haven’t been addressed?
Just before this incident, Hayes had many police officers throughout the school due to an alleged bomb threat as an added safety measure. However, in the weeks that followed, the number of officers on campus was reduced to only Officer Kolp, who has been at Hayes since 2018.
Ohio is one of the many no-underage purchase states, with no one under eighteen years old being allowed to obtain a firearm. However, parents or older friends can buy and then distribute to avoid this law.
In 2012, there were 13 school shootings nationwide. But in the years since, there has been a huge spike in cases of shootings happening on school property. There were over 80 U.S. public school shootings in 2024 alone and just barely three months into 2025, there have been four incidents.
An annual report conducted by CNN over the past 17 years shows that we have been going down the wrong path when it comes to preventing gun violence.
While legislators continue to crack down on new rules and policies for schools to follow, the school system itself continues to go down an unsafe path.
Change doesn’t have to be left to legislators to make decisions only to impact schools way in the future. There are many solutions to start addressing this problem; it just takes the administrators to sit down and start thinking. They can create major change within the school to start moving in the right direction.
Take Columbus City Schools, for example, which introduced metal detectors into their school system back in 2023. Delaware can look at other public schools’ safety policies and adapt their own to fit with the circumstances. It’s insane that Hayes should even have to consider this precautionary measure, but if the state won’t do anything, our administration should.
Officer Kolp said that the administration is continually working to prioritize safety. “The main priority of our administration is safety and even just their daily habits of checking doors, checking on visitors and just walking the halls all fall into that mindset of keeping [students] all safe,” Kolp said.
So far the district has tried to encourage students wearing IDs back into the system again this school year. After a failed attempt in the previous years, they had expected students to wear their IDs all day while at school for staff members to be able to identify students. Many students have chosen to not deal with the hassle of wearing an ID. However, if administrators really believe that IDs would help keep people safe, they should do more than just make an attempt at enforcing the rule.
The district has applied for many grants, with the most recent one being a safety grant last month. Aside from the monthly safety drills, school administrators talk about the different scenarios and practice what they would do. The district trains staff at the start of each school year on their safety expectations.
“The policy of ‘See something, Say Something’ has kept our school safe on multiple occasions and will continue to be the best way for our school to stay safe,” Kolp said.
Still, school districts’ efforts will only go so far, unless their actions are being backed up by effective legislative policy. Legislators need to pay more attention to what is happening in their schools. They hold a ton of power that can be used towards a positive change. Instead of worrying about discriminating between who can use their preferred bathroom, Ohio needs to focus on the safety of every student. Do better.
