I was really happy to see gubernatorial candidate Dan Forest’s message for law enforcement in Tuesday’s article titled “Lt. Gov. Forest tells Rowan County gathering law enforcement is top priority.”

The suggestion that we need to work with the U.S immigration and customs enforcement and having officers in every North Carolina school is such an amazing idea. We need to focus more on safety and how safe someone feels when going to a place like a school. I do not feel safe at school and that is one place you should come to and not worry. You should not come to school and have to worry if you are going to make it home.

As Forest said in the article, “Protecting our kids in schools is our highest priority, then you can find money from somewhere to place a resource officer in the schools to protect our kids.” I totally agree with that statement because no kid should have to go to school worried. If there were more resource officers and more security in schools, I feel that kids would feel more comfortable in school.

Some statistics prove that kids do not want to come to school because they do not feel safe. In 2017, 6.7% of students reported they missed class because they felt unsafe at school, according to the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Some of the reasons kids feel unsafe is because there are so many school shootings and not enough people to secure the school to help fix some of the issues.

We need to have a lot more security in school. It only takes one person to trigger a person, and then they just start going off. We need to fix this problem, and I really agree with the article about making students feel safe at school by adding more officers and more people to protect the students.

Hannah Griffin

Rockwell