Keeping students safe, local school reps sound off

With a month passing since the school shootings in Florida there is still much debate on how to keep our kids safe from something like this occurring again.
On March 14, 2018 students all over the country staged walkouts and protests. Yuba City Unified School District (YCUSD) wanted to give the students a chance to honor those killed in Florida and have the students come together in protest and solidarity without leaving school by hosting “Walk Up Not Out”. Students had activities on campus including a release of balloons with the names of the 17 students killed in Parkland, Florida.
At the Community Forum on Cyberbullying held at Allyn Scott Community Center in Marysville, California, March 13, 2018, YCUSD Director of Student Welfare and Attendance and Independence Academy Principal Rocco Greco said, “We are trying to give them a voice, while they stay in school.”
Greco says kids are more on edge these days. Yuba City High School recently had an incident with a 14 year old student who wrote what amounts to a threat of school violence on a desk in a classroom. The suspected student was subsequently arrested after an investigation.
Greco says they are taking a more direct approach to these types of incidents and it is difficult because statistics show that there is an uptick in these types of threats after an event such as the one in Florida. Schools must take each threat seriously even though many students are joking in poor taste or a student may have cognitive disabilities and not understand the seriousness of their actions.
Last year Andros Karperos School in Yuba City was evacuated due to a suspicious device found on campus. Students were efficiently evacuated to a nearby church.It was later found that the device was harmless or a hoax.
Keeping our students safe on campus is number one in the minds of school officials in the area now more than ever. Jolie Carreon, Director of Attendance and Discipline at Marysville Joint Unified School District (MJUSD), says the safety committee for the district has regular meetings and a safety plan with lock down drills conducted on campus.
Just last January Marysville High School went on a soft lockdown while police investigated a threat made on social media only to find out the threat originated in Georgia and likely was in reference to a school of the same name there.
Schools built more recently are required to have special locks on classrooms to keep students safely locked inside but still able to escape in a lockdown situation. Those built before have devices that effectively enable the same safety by placing the lock in place on the inside of the door.
Communication seems to be the main focus, both MJUSD and YCUSD use the Catapult system to notify staff of alerts on campuses. Yuba College also uses the same system, most recently used to alert students and faculty that telephone and internet services were out on campus.
According to G.H. Javaheripour, President of Yuba College, the school is conducting training in April and planning to create a safety committee.
When asked about how they feel about teachers carrying guns in our schools each responded with obvious regard for student safety in mind.
Javaheripour says, “We as educators are to educate.” He believes that it is the job of law enforcement to take on an armed assailant and that as educators we want to create a safe and healthy environment for our students, “but it should not come at requesting our faculty to become weaponized.”
Jolie says, “My first instinct is no way, but then I look at schools in Texas who allow certain teachers to have Concealed Carry Weapon(CCW) Permits without revealing who they are and they haven’t have any issues.” Jolie, like many of us, is not necessarily pro guns in schools but like all of us she wants to weigh the options carefully.
Greco, who carried under a CCW Permit, says, “The thing about having a weapon on you is you begin to look at people as targets or like they are going to do something.”
He doesn’t want students on campus having the feeling like there is something about to happen all the time or to feel like they are in a militarized place. YCUSD does currently have armed resource officers who are members of the police department as well as probation officers at some schools. Greco also brings up that as we know many who are highly trained in weapon use fail to act when the situation calls for action, as we saw in Florida.
Perhaps the answer is in forums like the one held on cyberbullying at the center last week helping bring a community together. On social media people seem to be so polarized to opposite sides that it is hard to even begin a real discussion without people degrading into calling each other stupid or other name calling and insults. Each of us is looking for safety and security in our communities but somehow we’re unable to get somewhere into the middle and discuss what really could be done effectively. Then, perhaps that is what has gotten us here in the first place.