Community input solicited for ideas on improving school safety

The Hot Springs County School Board’s discussion of school safety on July 19 opened with Superintendent Dustin Hunt pointing out that the school district had planned to conduct a complete safety audit just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

While the pandemic shut down any such audits, Hunt has since reached out to the state, and the Department of Homeland Security, to finally obtain a safety audit, reviewing the district’s facilities, practices and drills.

Those agencies have referred the district to other personnel in turn, while Hunt has reached out to Kevin Mitchell, executive director for the Wyoming Association for School Administrators.

“It’s not that we don’t get pieces of school safety (training), but these incidents happening in our country are complex and require a lot more education,” said Hunt, who added that, when schools ask for aid in working to ensure school safety, their staff members are asked what they would do in certain situations, for which they can offer little more than “theories and practices.”

“I don’t want to sound unprepared, (but) I’d rather say, ‘You’re the expert. What should we do?’” Hunt said. “We’ve had a crisis plan for a long time, but it’s time to revamp those practices.”

Hunt has requested a rewrite of the district’s crisis manual, citing its thickness and length of “a couple of hundred pages” as hindering its ability to be used as a quick reference tool in case of an actual emergency.

“We have our flip charts,” Hunt said. “If there’s a bomb threat, we flip to ‘bomb threat’ in the flip chart and follow our procedures.”

Hunt cited the district’s investment in ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evaluate) Training active shooter response protocol, even as he acknowledged that such heightened protections can make community members feel uncomfortable at losing the accessibility they’d come to associate with schools.

“It doesn’t feel as friendly as it used to, but safety has to come first,” Hunt said, while still encouraging community members to contribute their input.

To that end, John Gerrells addressed the board, asking the board members to allow armed and “well-trained” personnel in the schools, while also emphasizing, “I’m not asking for a guard at every door with an AR-15.”

Gerrells clarified that he wished to see a broad range of school employees have firearms available to them in lockboxes, to protect students from shooters on school grounds.

“I wouldn’t want them to be packing a gun up and down the halls,” Gerrells said. “It would be up to the individual, if they feel comfortable doing this. The ones that aren’t comfortable (with it) shouldn’t be told they have to do it.”

Gerrells asserted “time is of the essence” in an active shooter response, pointing out how police in Uvalde, Texas, took 77 minutes to respond to their recent school shooter.

“A lot of lives could have been saved if something could have happened earlier than that,” Gerrells said.

Board Treasurer Nichole Weyer relayed word she’d received, of state legislators’ apparent reluctance to fund school safety programs that they perceived as having lain fallow during the past few years, including the peak of the pandemic.

“So when we are talking to legislators, we do need to bring (up that) there are new safety and security concerns that schools do need money for,” Weyer said.

Board Clerk Joe Martinez mentioned in passing that he was “comfortable” with the idea of firearm lockboxes for staff, as he echoed fellow board members’ calls to pursue further input from the community.

“All options do need to be on the table,” said Clerk, while Hunt added that such ideas should be reviewed by safety audits and school staff members as well.

“I’m in favor of (arming district employees) too, but I also want to get some community input,” Board Trustee Clay Van Antwerp said. “This is not something to wade into lightly, which I don’t think anybody’s advocating or saying that.”