FEW FEEL overly comfortable about sending police and trained drug — sniffing dogs into the hallways of public schools. These are our children, after all, our sons and daughters — the subjects of these random searches.

Today, though, it is a necessary evil. Too much has happened in too many communities to pretend it is still the 1950s, a time when drugs and weapons in school were not an issue.

Those in the business of law enforcement, especially the men and women who serve as school resource officers, know this perhaps better than most. They are fully aware that this is the 21st century, a time when almost anything can happen at any time, and has, unfortunately, in other school systems in this and other states, to other people hundreds of miles from us.

Because they realize this, they take a proactive approach and do what they can to avert something more serious than a disrupted day at school. They have no qualms about putting students through a surprise inspection. Just recently school police used a specially trained drug dog out of Savannah at Brunswick High School, where officers checked students, their lockers, their backpacks and their desks for drugs or any illegal paraphernalia. They didn’t find much, and that’s good news. It speaks well of the students and staff there.

That doesn’t mean these searches are a waste of time, though. They are a reminder to students that the school system is serious about its intolerance of drugs and weapons.

It is a sentiment shared by the community.