Although he had failed the year before and could barely read, he was right about this. I’ve heard whispers of how much money a young man like him could make driving through the border checkpoint north of us in Falfurrias, and I must say it put my salary as a Texas schoolteacher to shame. It made the fight to keep him on the straight and narrow even harder.

He told me that if he didn’t pass his end-of-year state reading assessment, which determined whether or not he went to high school, he would drop out. This told me that he cared not just to do well, but to do what was right.

However, we knew, his classmates knew and our community knew that at some level, it didn’t make sense to struggle for the next half decade to graduate from high school functionally illiterate and conventionally unemployable.

As a student-reporter covering both fusion centers and the intersection between education and homeland security, my students’ voices always nagged me.

When a representative from the ACLU told me it just wasn’t cost-effective, in terms of preventing crime, to set up cameras all around the city, I thought of Roosevelt High School in Albany Park, which is full of young people who remind me of my own students. Last December, the wiring for the Internet in their building was so old it became a fire hazard and an entire lab was closed off to students.

When I wrote about a storm destroying an elementary school in Missouri, I thought about where my students would go if our building were ever damaged. The Missouri school was able to relocate to another building in the district that had room. My Texas district couldn’t build fast enough to keep up with the families coming across the border in search of a better life. A school could become overcrowded the very same year it was built.

As part of our U.S. Security and Civil Liberties course, I learned something which I must have already known:   There is a finite amount of money and somewhere there are people who must decide what to do with it. In terms of homeland security, money goes where it is deemed by “experts” to help the most people from the biggest threats.

I just wonder how much of these decisions are made by the political leanings of these experts. The experts I point to say the border wall wouldn’t curb illegal immigration. And yet it went up, at least partially, right before my eyes.

The experts I know say that children who can’t read well are more likely to drop out, and these children are more likely to end up in jail later in life. I suspect this is a nice way to say they are more likely to engage in criminal activity and hurt/cost our nation. And yet, our schools are full of old, boring books.

I know that on a very basic level, if we are not safe as individuals and secure as a nation, it doesn’t much matter if we are incredibly well educated. Money must be spent on national security. But I worry that in protecting us from the outside without focusing on the inside, we run the risk of spontaneous internal combustion.

I also know that money is spent on monitoring the activities of Americans to make sure they are not up to something suspicious. Since I became aware of the suspicious cast on citizens who are critical of how things are, I have always mitigated potentially unpatriotic thoughts with: If you’re listening, this is a joke.

Today I add that if you are listening, we, insomuch as we can, are listening back.

This time this criticism isn’t about substandard teaching, freefalling test scores or the achievement gap. Rather, the quality of school buildings themselves is in question.

In April, California Watch found “systematic failures by the state’s chief regulator of construction standards for public schools.”

State employees hired to inspect schools for earthquake safety were found to be inadequate and funding to improve school buildings was “virtually impossible” to secure, according to California Watch.

The state’s lack of enforcement of the Field Act, which maintains seismic regulations for school building construction, allowed “children and teachers to occupy buildings with structural flaws and potential safety hazards reported during construction,” said one California Watch story.

California has a 99.7 percent chance of a major earthquake in the next 30 years, according to the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast.

Mary Biron taught at Brooklyn Avenue Elementary in Los Angeles for over 35 years. For most of her career there, she helped develop and coordinate her school’s earthquake preparedness plan, raising money for emergency kits and implementing disaster procedures.

She says L.A. is lucky to have not had a major earthquake, but even beyond the California Watch findings, is dangerously underprepared for an earthquake.

“We were one of the best prepared schools because they [the principals] felt strongly about supporting our school in purchasing what we felt as a community,” she said.

It takes a grassroots effort to get schools earthquake-ready on a basic level. Beyond that, districts, and the entire state, are struggling for cash.

Kyle Ginnodo teaches 7^th grade math and science at a small charter school in Culver City, outside of Los Angeles. His schools participate in earthquake drills at the start of the year as part of the “Great California Shakeout.”

He says Californians are “very aware of earthquakes” and feels that “it is the entire area of Los Angeles that is not earthquake-ready.”

Specifically, he says that charter schools such as his are under various levels of oversight from traditional school districts like the Los Angeles Unified School District. Many charters buy the cheapest properties they can find, including churches, for their facilities.

“Schools pay exorbitant amounts for pretty run-down premises,” Ginnodo says. “Because that’s all they can afford.

As a district, LAUSD has major financial issues, as does the state of California. Ginnodo says he doesn’t know where the money for updating school properties could come from.

The issue of whether or not disaster-ready construction should be high on a school district’s list of financial priorities is an issue beyond California.

Adam Schwartz, of the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the organization is in the midst of “ongoing investigations” of the state’s two fusion centers, the State Terrorism and Intelligence Center in Springfield and the Crime Prevention Information Center in Chicago.

“We have not become aware of evidence in Illinois that either of these fusion centers has crossed a line,” he said.

He said the Illinois ACLU is primarily concerned that fusion centers, in and out of the state, might become vehicles for political spying.

Fusion centers, which collect information from all levels of law enforcement, can be particularly problematic because they amass so much information about individuals.

“Some of that intelligence is strong and some is weak,” Schwartz said, adding that there isn’t a clear vetting process to make sure what is and what is not useful or legitimate.

Further, there is both contemporary and historical precedent of the government using law enforcement techniques to gather information on individuals. The Red Squad operated in Chicago through much of the last century, collecting data on perceived dissidents; in Maryland, police conducted surveillance on peaceful activists in 2008.

People who have “unpopular views” should not be subjected to police investigation, he said.

Issues with fusion centers around the country have been cause for concern at the Illinois ACLU, Schwartz said. They are keeping an eye on local fusion centers to see that state officials are not spying on anyone without good reason.

“The gold standard is whether or not law enforcement needs to have reasonable suspicion of crime,” Schwartz said, adding that, the organization’s investigations into fusion centers are “figuring out whether they adopt that standard.”

The ACLU’s work, from fusion centers and beyond, is like a “‘canary in the mineshaft,’” warning of dangers well before they come to fruition,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a homeland security expert at Northwestern University.

He said, nonetheless, that fusion centers’ potential to spy on individuals wouldn’t be on the top of his list of police abuses.

In Illinois, the ACLU has been working on fusion centers for two to three years. Although they have not found any activities that might violate the civil liberties of citizens, they do have a lawsuit against that state fusion center seeking to enforce a FOIA request asking for information on the center’s privacy policy, it’s use of databases and the Internet.

Julia Romano, 20, was in 6^th grade when the September 11 attacks took place in New York City. She lived on Long Island, just outside of Queens. Her parents worked in the city. The horror of the day was not something her family or community could shelter her from.

She and her classmates were not initially told of the attacks – something she still says was a poor decision on the part of her teachers.

Today, as a senior about the graduate from Wellesley College outside of Boston, Romano says honest and frank discussion would have helped her process the event. Although she remembers discussions of the attack in class in the years that followed, the big issues were never addressed. She says her classes never discussed terrorism and conflict in the Middle East. Again, she says this would have helped.

Of course, different children require different approaches.

Kristen Lambert, a Chicago parent of a 6- and 3-year-old, told the Chicago Tribune that she decided to speak in code to her husband about bin Laden rather than break the news to her children.

“It is hard to explain, or try to explain, to a first-grader,” she said.

BrainPOP, a website with animated videos on various educational topics, responded to the news of bin Laden’s death quickly by updating their existing video on 9/11 to include the updated information.

In the video, Tim and Moby, a human and a robot (the characters through which BrainPOP videos explore all of its topics), visit Ground Zero. They give a brief synopsis of what happened and straightforwardly state that many died. The video doesn’t shy away from the truth of the matter, explaining how and why the attack occurred; but it also spares the viewer some of the day’s gruesome images.

Najira Ahmed, a Wellesley sophomore from New York City, says “ sheltering kids from the truth is a much greater harm than providing them with sufficient information to know the circumstances they are in.”

As a Muslim, a New Yorker and a child, says 9/11and the reaction her community had to it shaped her own identity. She says in discussing bin Laden’s death and actions, it’s key to make sure children understand the full scope of the issue insomuch as it affects them.

In the Tribune story, a family therapist says, “these are deep moral discussions” that children need to have.

Both Ahmed and Romano say parents’ and teachers’ glossing over of details led to a lot of intolerance in their community. Both recall adults acting with prejudice against Muslims but say it’s key for children to be aware one bad person does not mean an entire community should be seen that way.

Big news events and political nuance doesn’t necessarily affect a child’s day-to-day, says Ahmed, but the social rhetoric surrounding them does.

Therefore, it’s best that parents and teachers are there to help them understand and shift through bias, politics and unnecessary details.

Many of these state and local organizations, including Illinois’ and Chicago’s fusion centers, don’t have websites that are easily searchable or that answer questions for citizens. For curious Hoosiers, however, a quick Google search of “Indiana fusion center” yields a number one result that leads directly to the website of the Indiana Intelligence Fusion Center, which is operated by the state police.

“We thought it would be best to put as much information as possible on the website to answer questions and provide information to all interested parties,” said First Sergeant David R. Bursten, of the Indiana State Police Public Information Office.

The website includes basic information about what a fusion center is and where Indiana’s is located. It also gives guidance on how to identify and report suspicious activity. The site has a FAQ section, a direct phone number to contact and like at all of Indiana’s government websites, clicking “Help” leads you to the option to live chat with a real human.

Despite all of its functionality, Gerry and David Brown, who live in South Bend and work at the University of Notre Dame, both said they didn’t know the website existed.

David Brown said most Indianans are unlikely to think of the IIFC if they had something to report. They’d just call their local police if they saw something suspicious.

Gerry Brown said the link to “8 Signs of Terrorism,” a national information campaign, was a little useful, but didn’t go into enough detail. She felt that, overall, the website felt as if it were for “professionals in the field of law enforcement.”

The site led to more questions than it answered for David Brown. He said “security is the single major responsibility of a government to its citizens,” but wonders about the cost-effectiveness of the program.

He questioned whether any useful tips had been made through the site, and also if it perhaps fosters “a heightened state of alertness or anxiety.”

Sergeant Bursten said the site has been helpful for keeping citizens informed, and the development of a fusion center overall has made law enforcement better by improving communication between state police and local and federal officials.

As for whether or not the site and its warnings might make people worried or cause them to overreact to an incident, he said, “the intent is not to have people paranoid, but observant.”

CPIC also monitors the city’s Police Observation Devices, which were placed in high-crime areas in 2003 to record and thwart illegal activities in the city, according to Chicago police.

The center is so tech-savvy that it’s found a model to predict where and when crimes could happen, Minority Report-style, according to a story reported last Friday in the Chicago Sun-Times.

CPIC is unique to Chicago. And it goes beyond just community information and city police. It’s a fusion center, a place that brings together and acts on intelligence from various sectors to work for security in the United States. Chicago’s fusion center is different from the many across the nation. As CPD police representative Sergeant Antionette Urstitti explained in an email, CPIC has two goals, “violent crime reduction and terrorist threat assessment.”

In 2004, states began developing their own fusion centers to share intelligence on terrorism, according to the Department of Homeland Security.  In 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security issued a set of guidelines for starting and running these centers at any level, local, state or federal for the law enforcement, intelligence and private sectors.

The name fusion center might, at first, conjure an image of lab-coat donning scientists researching the next breakthrough in physics. As exciting as that seems, that’s just not the case. Instead of bringing together atoms, a fusion center brings together intelligence effectively at all levels.

The 9/11 Commission Report found holes in the information-sharing practices between agencies such as the National Security Agency and CIA. For example, the NSA had known about and tracked one of the 9/11 hijackers as early as 1999, according to the report, but this information was not shared effectively with the CIA, Counterterrorist Center, FBI or international intelligence.

Fusion centers are one of the government’s answers to the question of how to bring together different sources of information on potential criminals and terrorists.

In a statement to the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs in September 2009, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said explained that the 72 fusion centers find and analyze trends to share up-to-date information between local law enforcement and DHS.

In this statement, she emphasized the role of highly local intelligence – such as what CPIC gathers – in this “two-way” communication. She said, “The work of state, local, and tribal law enforcement at the local level puts them in the best position to notice when something is out of place and warrants a closer look—which is often the first step to thwarting a domestic terrorism plot.”

The intelligence gathered by fusion centers is not without controversy, however. The constant monitoring and data-mining practices of fusion centers would lead to “nothing less than a total surveillance society,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union in a 2008 “Fusion Center Update.”

Adam Schwartz, a staff attorney with the Illinois ACLU, said the gathering intelligence is not inherently problematic, but there’s much potential for abuse.

Whether or not Big Brother is watching, one thing is sure: fusion centers have transformed law enforcement in Chicago and the use of intelligence across the nation.

In Illinois, the School Safety Drill Act from 2006 requires schools to be prepared for the fire and tornado drills most are familiar with, but also bus drills and school lockdown drills. In the past decade, panning for such crisis situations have expanded society’s notion of homeland security.

How these drills are implemented, and how schools respond to unique crisis such as building damage, is largely up to individual districts, said Illinois State Board of Education representative Mary Fergus.

Regional education boards make sure districts are in compliance, she said. The state board offers training and support to districts and schools to support them in creating plans.

What districts need to consider in crisis anywhere goes beyond what many of us might consider, said Zachary Kolsky, the web and marketing coordinator for the National Education Association Health Information Network.

The NEA HIN wrote its School Crisis Guide to help schools through the process of crisis preparation. The organization decided to create it after the events at Columbine in 1999, and the guide was updated in 2007, Kolsky said.

“What we’re advocating for preparation,” he said. “Oftentimes you can’t prevent crisis, but what you can control is your level of preparedness.”

And what preparedness looks like is different from campus to campus. Schools are built differently and have different environmental susceptibilities, Kolsky said.

In Illinois, for example, it doesn’t make sense to have a plan for a volcano, but having a procedure for tornados would be pivotal.

For instance, students at Griffith Elementary School in Ferguson, Missouri will be completing the school year at a district middle school after a storm ravaged the area Friday April 27, according to Joe Scott, who wrote about the school for Patch.com.

He said school administrators had to react quickly after the school building sustained water damage – the plan for relocating students was in place by noon the day following the storm.

It was fortunate, he said, that the district had space for more students at the middle school.

Regardless of location or whatever unique challenges a school may have to face, Kolsky said “It’s important to know what everyone’s role is” before, during and after a crisis.

“All stakeholders,” including teachers, parents, students, administrators and school support staff should be clear on what they should do in a crisis situation, he said.

Schools should have a “parent-student reunification plan” that sets aside a location or two for parents and students to meet, Kolsky said. This could be a sports field for some schools, or a community church for others.

This means, of course, that parents and community members alike should be in the loop for a crisis plan. First responders are other key players in a crisis preparedness plan, Kolsky said.

Finally, addressing a crisis goes beyond mitigating the immediate situation. It’s also important for schools to plan for the long-term mental and physical health of students, teachers and other school staff, Kolsky said. “It’s vital for a return to normalcy.”

The NEA HIN School Crisis Guide was developed from interviews with people at schools that had dealt with crisis. They were asked what they knew now that they wish they’d known then, Kolsky said.

Ultimately, the key to effective crisis preparation at schools is good communication.

“The most important thing is to keep talking about it and keep thinking about it,” Kolsky said. “Be aware, no matter who you are. It’s never a bad time to talk about crisis preparedness.”

Arne Duncan addressed members of the Educations Writers Association in New Orleans.

The U.S. high school dropout rate – about 25 percent – is both “economically unsustainable and morally unacceptable,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Friday at the Education Writers Association national seminar in New Orleans.

That failure is also dangerous, said Duncan, adding that education should be the “epicenter” of national security reporting.

He was referring to a November 2010 New York Times op-ed, “Teaching for America” in which columnist Thomas Friedman argued that the poor state of education in the United States is a major risk to its global standing and safety as a nation.

“The bad news is that for years now we’ve been getting out-educated,” Friedman wrote. “The good news is that cities, states and the federal government are all fighting back. But have no illusions. We’re in a hole.”

Chicago is no exception. The Chicago Public Schools’ 2010 dropout rate was 12.8 percent, up from 2009’s 9.7 percent, according to the Illinois State Board of Education.

Students who can’t read on level by third grade are four times more likely to fail to receive a diploma than those who are proficient, according to a study released Friday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Less than a third of CPS fourth graders tested proficient in reading last year in Chicago, according to the state education department.

The Casey Foundation study also found that students who live in poverty are three times more likely to drop out or not graduate on time than those from higher-income backgrounds.

Of students in the city’s public schools, 87 percent are low-income, according to the Illinois State Board of Education.

Students who are both behind in reading and from low-income families fail to graduate on time or drop out at a rate six times higher than average, the study found.

According to the National Education Association, people without high school diplomas are less likely to have jobs and more likely to be in prison than their counterparts who graduated.

If public education today functions in a way that is, again, in the words of Duncan, “morally unacceptable,” then what does the Department of Homeland Security expect, morally, of the people the institution fails?

The answer isn’t new or surprising. In this city of dropout factories, the DHS partners with the police to reduce violence through the Crime Prevention and Information Center, an Chicago fusion center that gathers and analyzes intelligence from local, state and federal authorities.

This is, of course, not to say this center does not fulfill a necessary role. It is rather to wonder why the DHS’s presence in Chicago comes most noticeably in the form of cameras monitoring the streets and scanners monitoring our airports.

When we know stronger schools would mean safer streets, why is security a fleeting rationale for improving schools rather than improving schools a central theme in securing the nation?

The first instance of “comprehensive federal education legislation” was the National Defense Education Act in 1958, fueled by the need to produce the world’s best thinkers in the Cold War, according to the Department of Education.

The Obama administration has said improving math and science education is a goal to keep the country competitive.

Duncan said on Friday that the United States is losing jobs because companies can’t find thinkers strong enough to fill positions needed and that only 25 percent of American young people qualify to even join the military.

With young Americans unprepared at a basic level to serve the country, it’s clear that better schools would lead to a smarter, stronger America.