For 17-year-old Fort Myers, Florida, high school senior Alexis Queen, safety at school is an illusion, especially since the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead. She tells Teen Vogue that going to class scares her “on a lot of different levels.”

Alexis asks herself what many students are asking themselves as they return to America's schools this fall: “What if it’s my school next, or what if it’s the school down the street next?”

Ostensibly, when faced with a student population riddled with fear for even going to class, and a record high number of deadly school shootings, the school administration should consider strategies to keep students safe. Alexis feels her school has not done what is needed to ensure that all students feel comfortable with their level of security; “a few teachers will talk about it but the administration is very hush-hush,” she says. “They’re not really saying anything, but it’s putting a lot of kids kind of on edge that we don’t really know how we are protected.”

When reached by Teen Vogue to comment on her school’s safety measures, a spokesperson from the district pointed us to their code of conduct which details their “zero tolerance policy” and cited “video surveillance, security personnel, school resource officers and staff that monitor and patrol the school at all times” class is in session as additional security measures, but did not detail how this information is conveyed to students.

Artwork by: Anthony Gerace (@anthonywgerace) | Images via Getty

While most educational policy is set at the state level, districts take their broader cues from the federal government. This is where Betsy DeVos comes in, the Donald Trump–appointed hyper-conservative Secretary of Education. Of her many awe-inspiring acts, recently, DeVos is reportedly considering whether schools can use federal money to fund firearms on campus, according to sources with knowledge of the plan, who spoke with The New York Times. It would be a move the Times called “unprecedented,” as it would be “reversing a longstanding position taken by the federal government that it should not pay to outfit schools with weapons.” Additionally, most law enforcement experts don’t believe teachers should carry guns—and in June, DeVos told Congress that the federal school safety commission wouldn't investigate the role of guns in school violence.

If this were to come to fruition, it would be one of DeVos’s many acts that have signaled, since her nomination, that student safety and, specifically, the needs of marginalized students are not a priority for the Department of Education. DeVos has shoved civil rights issues to the bottom of the DOE’s to-do list, reversing Obama-era policies intended to ensure access to equal education and, according to many experts, threatening educational integration by vaunting state-level voucher programs (state-funded scholarships that allow students to attend private and charter schools over their district public schools).