Last week, the Worcester Public School Board voted against teaching gun education in Worcester Public Schools by using Virtual Reality headsets.

The goal of the proposed program was to expand upon the Safety Quest program used in the Worcester Public School System. Safety Quest is a mobile classroom bus that is meant to teach kids how to deal with hazardous situations, including escaping a house during a fire, crossing the street safely, and spotting potential hazards around the home. Inside the bus are multiple touch screens and virtual reality headsets for students to learn with.

Safety Quest is made primarily for middle schoolers and has been traveling to Worcester Public Schools throughout the year. Dr. Michael Hirsh, Worcester’s current medical director in the Division of Public Health believes this bus could also be used to teach kids gun safety skills in the event of a school shooting. He first brought up the idea at a Worcester Public Health meeting on September 9. 

However, many educators within Worcester are opposed to the idea, not wanting to have weapons in class education. In an interview with the Telegram and Gazette, Hirsh continued to push for his idea for the program stating that “With the rising number of child fatalities due to firearms, we thought we could include it in the van… the graphic design company that did all of the work creating these modules for Safety Quest, they are incredibly sensitive. They have worked on presentations for children and they know what colors to use, what music to use.” For now, the program has been voted against, but Hirsh hopes other programs for gun safety can still happen in the future.

Hirsh’s claim that Safety Quest can perfectly create presentations for children seems questionable once you look into the program’s current material. Safety Quest’s introduction video reads like an outdated PSA from people trying to seem trendy for the middle school audience. It features a character that begins by mentioning she has 20 million subscribers on YouTube,  then telling the audience to join the “safety squad” and that she needs our help to get “safety trending worldwide, no cap.” She goes on to tell the audience to “get ready to play gucci games to become a safety savage” in a clear attempt to connect with the young audience the videos will be shown to. While these types of PSAs have existed for a long time and may work for something like safety of crossing the street, it’s difficult to see them working for teaching the difficult and grim topic of gun safety. This is before even considering what this would look like in Virtual Reality, an experience designed for its realism by placing you directly into the eyes of someone. In a gun safety experience for Virtual Reality, Safety Quest would need to build something that teaches what to do during a school shooting without creating anxiety and mental health problems in children. Finding an effective middle ground to do both seems like an impossible task. 

The idea of using Virtual Reality seems even more unreasonable, considering that Worcester schools are already required to do lockdown drills at least twice a year. Gun safety teaching in schools has been on the rise as school shootings continue to rise around the US. According to Everytown, 95% of schools in the US do some type of lockdown training to prepare for a possible school shooting. However, there is very little information on how successful these programs are at preventing school shootings. These programs, while having the goal of educating and preventing death from school shootings, inevitably create fear in school children. Proposals like using Virtual Reality or games for teaching does not solve these issues but only worsens them. The only real solution to stopping school shootings is banning assault weapons and tightening background checks to prevent school shootings by limiting the amount of guns. We need to stop putting the burden on school children and onto our lawmakers to ban the guns that cause tragedies to take place.

Correction: The Worcester School Committee did not take a vote last week (or ever) against teaching gun education by using virtual reality in Worcester Public Schools. The Scarlet regrets this error.