The North Carolina Center for Safer Schools will assemble a team of 24 parents focused on school safety — a move that comes as the number of shootings and hoax threats of violence rises on school campuses across the nation.
State Superintendent Catherine Truitt briefly spoke Thursday before the State Board of Education about the center’s recent work and included a note on her slideshow about the pending creation of a “parent engagement” initiative at the center.
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Department of Public Instruction spokeswoman Blair Rhoades said the initiative will include a 24-member team, comprised of three parents from each of the eight education regions in the state. One of the three parents would be from a charter school and the other two would be from traditional public school districts.
The center is currently working with the North Carolina Parent Teacher Association and school districts to gauge parent interest in participating. The center isn’t yet considering appointments for the team and has yet to announce details about what it will do and how parents can get involved.
After Truitt’s presentation, State Board of Education members and advisers said they wanted to see what more can be done to protect schools from mass shootings.
Leah Carper, a board advisor and last year’s state teacher of the year, said she knows how concerned parents are about a mass shooting happening at their child’s school.
“It really is on the forefront of their minds, every day, it’s also on the mind of educators every day,” Carper said. “Every teacher I interact with doesn’t ask if it’s going to happen to them. They wonder when. That’s what they wonder.
“I know teachers who keep an extra pair of shoes in their drawer so they can switch their shoes really fast so they can run. I’ve heard teachers say they’re afraid when they hear a balloon pop in the hallway or when they hear a locker door slam.”
Marcela Villasuso Venegas, a high school senior student advisor to the board, said her cousins in Mexico had no idea what a lockdown drill was when she told them about having to do them.
Villasuso Venegas said she mastered lockdown drills before she mastered reading and basic math and lamented that the experience is unique to the United States.
“It should be something no one understands,” she said. ”I shouldn’t go to school and wonder if I will be hurt or I could lose my life. It’s never been, is this going to happen? It’s preparing for when this happens, and we shouldn’t have to do that.”
The Center for Safer Schools, due to the budget passed in 2022, will hire 12-15 more employees to expand services, including a safety specialist for each of the eight education regions.
One of those new employees will be a parent coordinator, who will work with schools and parents across North Carolina. The coordinator will provide resources for parents on potential safety training, schools’ chain of command and what parents can do during a critical incident at a school.
The scope of the coordinator’s work will also include Title IX and the Americans with Disabilities Act’s Section 504 on learning accommodations for identified students.
Currently, the center manages an anonymous tip line system and conducts training for educators and students, among other things. For example, for some 7th grade students, the center educates them on gun violence and its ramifications. The center also works with some students on leadership skills, using social media safely and recognizing signs of mental health challenges in their peers, among other things.
Educators can receive training on panic alarms, emergency response protocols and behavioral threat assessments, among other things.
The Center for Safer Schools focuses on students’ physical safety, as well as bullying.
A recent New York Times analysis found that mass shootings at schools are rising but still comprise less than 1% of all children’s deaths from guns and remain rare.
Parent surveys show student safety is a top priority for them, Truitt said. That’s likely because of gun violence happening in schools and because of hoax threats of violence.
“I always try to think about the statistics, and I don’t really spend a lot of time worrying about gun violence in my kids’ public schools,” Truitt said. “However, parents are very worried, and we have parents reaching out to us all the time and asking what is being done, because they’re not really aware.”
Truitt advised parents to ask their schools how they plan to use their safety grant funding.
The Department of Public Instruction has declined to detail the grant applications that were funded beyond labeling the expenses as “equipment,” “services,” or “training,” citing security concerns. Last month, Wake County Public School System officials said they had decided to pursue five physical security projects but wouldn’t say what they were because they did not want to expose schools’ vulnerabilities — which the projects would seek to fix — to the wrong people.
State Board of Education members who spoke Thursday said they agreed schools needed to be safer, but they did not agree on how to do it.
Board Member Amy White and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson suggested “hardening” schools. White suggested fences around campuses.
Board Member Wendell Hall said cost is a factor, though, referencing a school that looked at buying bulletproof glass.
“The cost of bulletproof glass just blew some of us out of the water,” he said. “A square of bulletproof glass.”
He said he knows some schools have also struggled to hire school resource officers.
Robinson, a gun rights advocate, said schools should accept donations for safety equipment and shouldn’t balk at the cost of projects.
“I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a dollar sign on my kid’s life,” Robinson said. “[(Schools]) are soft targets for madwomen and men who want to do damage. We need to put our money where our mouth is and harden schools.”
The cost of physical safety measures is high, from Truitt’s perspective, because of how expensive they are compared to how much more that money can buy in education.
But that money has to be spent, she said, because of how worried families and school employees are about the violence they see happening elsewhere. She said stories like Carper’s — about teachers keeping running shoes in a drawer or being easily spooked by normal school sounds — are “startling” and “hard to hear.”
Carper suggested a safety-focused employee at every school, to lift some of the burden of safety off the backs of educators, some of whom are quitting as safety issues rise.
Security experts who spoke with WRAL News earlier this year had mixed opinions on using school resource officers. They cautioned that weapons detection monitors wouldn’t be complete solutions and would cost much more than other effective preventative measures, leaving school leaders to decide what to prioritize. Those experts favored anonymous tip lines, training for staff and students on recognizing suspicious behavior, bullying prevention and safe gun storage practices at home, among other things.
During the latest round of school safety grant funding, North Carolina school systems largely focused on physical security measures.
Schools applied for $59.5 million in safety equipment and received just $36.5 million of that. They applied for $3.1 million in services and received just about $80,000 less than that. They applied for $1.9 million in training and received about $1.6 million.
Schools also added tens of millions of dollars worth of school resource officers.