Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs orders human psychological needs with the understanding that people are incapable of paying attention to higher level needs when lower level needs remain unmet. The lower level needs include food, shelter and safety. The upper level growth needs include the need to understand, which motivates students to learn. Therefore, for a school to achieve its educational mission, it is important for it to make students must feel safe and secure.
Historically, the law defines the relationship between schools and students as "in loco parentis," which is Latin for "in the place of the parents." The schools have a legal duty to protect students to the best of their ability when school is in session. Schools can be held liable if students are injured due to a lack of due care. To guard against such liability, it is important for schools to have security measures in place.
If a student feels that being in the classroom is a risk, that student is unlikely to take the additional risk of making a mistake in front of his or her peers, even if that making that mistake makes it possible to learn from it. The Center for the Prevention of School Violence, a branch of the North Carolina juvenile justice system, recognizes the connection between safety and learning and defines its mission as creating "environments ... free of fear and conducive to learning."
Schools cannot teach students who don't come to school. The federal Educational Resources Information Center, in a 1999 report entitled "The Fundamentals of School Security," reported that students at times feel too unsafe to attend school, and that decreases in actual violence do not decrease the numbers of those students. Therefore, it is important for schools to make the environment visibly secure to keep students in school and learning.
Schools face the challenge of creating a community out of a number of people who more likely would not choose to be together otherwise. Under these circumstances, Principal Cheryl Rodgers of Holland Woods Middle School in Port Huron, Michigan, told "Education Week," "conflict is a part of the natural order." This conflict remains inevitable even under the best of circumstances, and requiring some degree of security is necessary to make sure that the conflict does not cause harm.