Examples of metro school safety efforts
Cobb County School District has a public safety department with 44 employees and a $3.3 million budget.
School resource officers: At least one officer in each of the district's 16 high schools. Campbell, McEachern, Osborne, Pebblebrook, South Cobb and North Cobb high schools each have two officers. Thirteen officers cover 25 middle schools. Eight middle schools have a dedicated officer. Five officers cover the remaining 17 middle schools. Five at-large officers have specialized roles, dealing with gangs, drugs, K-9 dogs and investigations.
Specific safety precautions: Badge access is required at all external doors. Elementary schools have buzz-in system on the main front door.
Life after Sandy Hook: Buzz-in system expanded to include all elementary schools at a cost of $900,000.
Gwinnett County Public Schools, the state's largest school district, is devoting $4.6 million and 46 employees this year to school safety. The department has 28 at present but is in the process of adding 18.
School resource officers: By year's end, the district will go from having one school resource officer per school cluster to two (18 new in total).
Specific security precautions: All school visitors are greeted by a staff member and go through a check-in process.
Life after Sandy Hook: A task force was formed to look at the district's safety programs and procedures. The task force recommended and the school board approved 18 more employees in school safety to increase the school resource officers from one to two per cluster.
Cherokee County School District has 13 employees and $1.05 million dedicated to school security.
School resources officers: 11 certified officers each have oversight over security at more than one school, including high, middle and elementary schools.
Specific security precautions: School visits must show photo I.D., have a verifiable reason to be on campus and receive a school visitor's badge before going beyond the front office.
Life after Sandy Hook: An ad hoc safety and security committee was established. Two changes will occur as a result — including by Labor Day, 13 elementary schools will be getting security cameras installed so that all elementary schools will have security cameras. Digital backup capability for intrusion and fire systems will be installed at 20 schools and facilities by the end of December. Staff members are reviewing how to integrate a proposed distress and panic alarm system with existing technology and communications systems.
Source: Gwinnett, Cobb and Cherokee school districts and the Georgia Emergency Management Agency. Compiled by staff writers Nancy Badertscher and Daarel Burnette.
Door locks and security cameras in working order? Check.
Intrusion alarm operational? Yes.
And, crucially, the staff at the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy had trained for intruder alerts, according to the school’s state-mandated safety plan.
Despite all the preparation and security hardware, though, a man with an AK-47 type rifle got into the elementary school Tuesday and fired several rounds. Had it been a high school, he might have confronted an armed guard, but like many other local systems the DeKalb County School District typically does not station officers in elementary schools.
This incident could change that. No one was hurt, but the close call is already triggering a debate over dollars versus risk. Is it time to arm elementary schools in Atlanta the way we do middle and high schools, or is the cost too high?
McNair Principal Brian Bolden has ample praise for his bookkeeper Antoinette Tuff. Armed only with a formidable personality, the front office worker sweet-talked the intruder into surrendering. When asked, though, if he’d prefer to have a cop with a gun at the door, Bolden said this: “I think all elementary schools at this point need to have them, because there’s such an immediate threat.”
The former high school principal said the locus of violence seems to be shifting from high schools. “I think one of the reasons is that bad guys are realizing that good guys aren’t in elementary schools — good guys who are armed.”
McNair parent Ashley Bryant wants a cop in the school, too. “I think a school resource officer would prevent future events like this from happening,” she said, using the euphemistic title for school cops.
In 2012, DeKalb spent more than $3.2 million on 57 school police officers. They patrolled elementary schools but were stationed at high schools, middle schools and outside the superintendent’s office. Districts have traditionally put armed guards in schools with older youths because the students themselves can be as much a threat as outside intruders.
DeKalb has about 40 middle and high schools, and twice as many elementary schools. Expanding the force to fill those elementary schools could cost at least $4 million, given the current price per officer, at a time when teachers haven’t had a raise in years.
Still, this incident has caused interim DeKalb Schools Superintendent Michael Thurmond to consider the possibility. “We’re going to look at it and review it,” he said Friday.
It’s unclear how much it would cost to fill elementary schools across metro Atlanta. But in 2012, DeKalb and seven other school districts in the metro area spent a cumulative $28 million on school security, a 23 percent jump from five years earlier. Some of the money was for security systems. Most, though, went to hiring cops for middle and high schools.
Georgia School Superintendent John Barge said it may be time for the state to help pay for school police, so districts can hire more.
“It’ll be an extremely expensive funding issue,” he said, “but what value do you place on the life of children?”
Some say it would be cheaper to put firepower into the hands of willing teachers and school administrators. Arkansas districts had been arming staffers for years and were planning to arm more, until the state attorney general decided this month that it was against the law. It’s illegal in Georgia, too, but the General Assembly may try to change that next year.
“I’m sticking with my guns, saying we do need it,” said state Rep. Willie Talton, R-Warner Robins, a 40-year law enforcement veteran and a co-sponsor of a bill that could put guns in school employees’ hands. “Either we do that or we have to put security in those schools because we’re living in an entirely different world, and the kids have to be protected.”
Ronald Stephens, who has testified before Congress about school violence, would rather see trained officers deployed. Lethal force can require split-second decision making, skills that a civilian may not have honed, he said. “Having a gun could be helpful, but there’s so much responsibility that comes with it.”
Yet the former teacher turned director of the National School Safety Center in California said he is also wary about overdoing security. School boards must somehow provide adequate safety in schools “without turning them into an armed camp or making them look like a prison camp,” he said.
The slaughter of unguarded children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last year awakened the nation to the risk in elementary schools.
Officials in Forsyth County convened a task force of local law enforcement to study security. They identified several areas for improvement, but with financing limited they prioritized elementary schools. They installed electronic “buzz-in” locks at every one. Cobb County officials set aside $900,000 in a tight budget to make sure all its elementary schools also had buzz-in systems, and Cherokee County decided to equip 13 elementary schools with security cameras.
Ken Trump, a school security expert, said elementary schools deserve as much attention as high schools. “We have to make sure we don’t make elementary schools appear to be softer and easier targets,” he said. The national consultant based in Cleveland and former school security director said broad school safety reforms got lost in a post-Sandy Hook debate over gun control.
Clarence E. Cox III, chief of Clayton County Public Schools’ new police force, said he and his officers are trying to reform security there, beginning with the culture. Most doors are supposed to be locked, but at many schools people prop them open.
Cox said his officers close them, but “most schools are so large it’s hard to secure all the doors unless you have participation from all the faculty and the staff.” His officers have been reporting the incidents.
At McNair, police say Michael Brandon Hill got in with a gun because the door didn’t fully close behind someone entering ahead of him. It might have been rude for the person ahead of Hill to close the door in his face, but Cox said safety requires a change in attitudes that must be embraced by civilians.
“Although they’re not trained as law enforcement or security officers, they do have a responsibility to challenge people,” he said, “because if you challenge people they often just turn around and walk away.”
Bolden, the McNair principal, said training helped to avert disaster. He holds “intruder alert” drills about once a month because the school is in a high-crime area.
When the alert goes out over the intercom, teachers have 15 seconds to get their kids into the classroom and to lock the door and turn out the lights. Tuff’s job was to stall the intruder until police arrived, and the 911 recordings indicate she did that beautifully.
“She single-handedly made him feel like a human being,” Bolden said. He acknowledged, though, that her personality played as much a role as the drills. “I don’t think any kind of training could teach you how to effectively connect with someone’s heart,” he said.
Talton, the lawmaker who advocates either more guns or more police, said schools cannot count on such an uncertain defense.
“She was good,” he said, “but how often are you going to have that?”
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