The way that the nation's public schools have responded to a string of school shootings in recent years is troubling. Depending on where they go to school, today's students may be routinely subjected to a host of advanced security measures, including metal detectors, surveillance cameras, searches of their personal belongings, patrols by specially trained police dogs, random drug testing and even, in a few abhorrent cases, strip searches.

Equally alarming is that the nation's courts have upheld increasing intrusions on students' privacy, to the point that public school students can no longer count on the Constitution's Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches and seizures. School children have become, from a constitutional perspective, second-class citizens.

Educators and parents are understandably worried about the safety of children since a series of school shootings began three years ago, culminating with the Columbine High School killings in April 1999. Some schools reacted by instituting procedures that were relevant to the problem: They made it easier for students to report weapons on campus, toughened disciplinary consequences when students were caught with weapons and gave school personnel more training to help them recognize troubled students and handle campus emergencies.

Those were logical, cool-headed responses. But what starts out being reasonable can advance to unreasonable when driven by paranoia and lack of information. And that is what is happening today in public schools.

The fact is that the vast majority of children go to school each day, encounter no shootings, stabbings or other serious mayhem, and come home safely. Yet all over the country officials are turning schools into fortresses and using heavy-handed law enforcement tactics against schoolchildren who have done nothing wrong. The academic process is disrupted and students are left feeling like criminals. What kind of environment is this for our children?

There are many steps school districts can take to make schools safer places without turning them into prison-like institutions. Some of the ideas are being tried in Florida. For example, officials in almost two dozen Florida counties realized that in most cases where weapons are found or violence occurs, someone in the school knew about it in advance. So officials in those counties are setting up school safety hot lines to allow students and others to report anything they see or hear. Every school district should have a well-publicized system that encourages students to report and gives them the protection of anonymity.

A program announced by Gov. Jeb Bush last April, dubbed "Not In My School," would encourage students and principals to work together to monitor their schools for criminal activity and to attack thorny problems through conflict resolution sessions. That approach treats students as safe-school partners rather than potential crime suspects and has the added benefit of teaching children ways to handle problems as adults.

Smaller class sizes, smaller schools, more guidance counselors and psychologists, a lighter paperwork load for teachers -- all would go a long way toward reducing tensions that can lead to violence. But instead, too many school districts driven by fear are relying on faster -- and cheaper -- fixes: fences, dogs, cameras, searches, drug tests.

What lies ahead if we continue traveling down that road? Imagine the public school in your neighborhood surrounded by barbed wire, with police patrolling the grounds, drug-sniffing dogs checking children as they enter school and students forced to supply urine samples for testing. That place is just around the bend. And we aren't going to like it when we get there.

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