Private consultants will visit the Texarkana School District on Monday to train employees - from teachers and cafeteria workers to bus drivers and custodians - how to respond if an armed intruder enters one of the 4,300-student district’s 10 schools.
The security consultants, from Missouri-based Strategos International, will also hold sessions for a group less frequently involved in school-safety training -parents.
In school-shooting situations, the victims are from the community, the first responders are from the community and “most of the time, the attacker is even from the community,” said Vaughn Baker, president of Strategos International. “We really feel the solutions need to be community-based, as well.”
Texarkana’s $30,000 contract with the consultants, which includes a review of district facilities, comes at a time when school systems around the state are arming employees, hiring guards and seeking taxpayer support for building upgrades such as new locks and shatterproof glass. It’s all in preparation for an event education leaders acknowledge is unlikely to occur - the presence of a gunman in their schools.
At recent legislative hearings, school district leaders who used a state law for private security guards as the basis for arming staff members cited the fatal December 2012 shootings at an elementary school in Connecticut as a cause for renewed emphasis on school-safety plans.
“I think there is just, across our nation, a heightened sense of security,” Genia Bullock, spokesman for the Texarkana School District, said about the safety training. “We are always looking at ways that we can improve.Our goal is to provide a safe and nurturing environment for our students and our staff.”
Monday’s voluntary parents session will include a review of how to identify warning signs of bullying or threats of violence in children’s stories about school and their social-media use, and what parents should report to school administrators or law-enforcement officials, Baker said.
That session will follow a day of drills and specialized training for groups of school employees.
Teachers will learn how to act in a “lockdown” situation, when all internal doors are locked to prevent easy movement through the building. Bus drivers will learn how to prevent access to their vehicles and monitor student behavior. Also, school employees will meet with Texarkana police to ensure that their procedures for unexpected school events don’t conflict, Baker said.
Strategos has previously worked with districts in 15 states, including Arkansas.
Texarkana administrators selected the firm from a list of proposals, Bullock said. The consultants have already visited the district’s schools to review the facilities and to suggest upgrades, such as concrete pillars that prevent vehicular access to the fronts of buildings and upgraded locks.
The Texarkana School District has one police officer who patrols the high school, Bullock said. The district also employs five civilian security guards under a legal provision that recently came under statewide scrutiny when Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel issued an opinion about it. In the opinion, McDaniel said districts couldn’t use a state security-guard law as a means to arm teachers and staff members, including uniformed guards directly employed by the school systems.
The state Board of Private Investigators and Private Security Agencies recently decided to allow those school employees to maintain their private-guard commissions for two years.
Some lawmakers have suggested revising state law to allow the practice to continue. Others, who have argued that only police officers should be armed in schools, suggested that building upgrades and training are a better way to respond to the threat of school violence, which they called statistically unlikely.
Texarkana school leaders hope the training will help the community members feel more empowered and confident in the school’s security plans, Bullock said.
“It is a unique approach,” she said. “We feel that providing training for all members of our school system, as well as parents and families, is very important.”
Arkansas, Pages 13 on 10/13/2013