Wake County school leaders want to create a real-time security center to help the school system monitor issues and respond to them more quickly, leaders told county commissioners and the school board Monday.
Wake county and school leaders discussed improving school safety, access to school meals and infrastructure sustainability during a joint meeting Monday evening — the annual meeting between the two groups.
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Officials didn’t go into too much detail about what that would consist of but said it was a high priority as system leaders deliberate more ways to make schools safer.
The center “would have people sitting there monitoring what’s happening in schools and be able to respond in real-time,” said Clinton L. Robinson Jr., system chief of staff and strategic planning. Robinson said it was a “new and creative” idea that he and Kendrick Scott, system security office senior director, would like to push forward.
Commissioners and school board members thanked Robinson and Scott for their presentation.
“We spend a lot of time in the community and school security is something everybody is worried about, even if you don’t have children in the schools because you see what happens in other places,” Commissioner Vickie Adamson said.
Several commissioners noted that Robinson and Scott’s presentation on safety was heavy on physical safety measures and asked what leaders were doing to address violence prevention, conflict resolution or students’ social and emotional needs.
Superintendent Robert Taylor included increased permanent staffing for counselors and social workers in his budget for the upcoming school year. A final budget won’t be passed until October, as leaders finalize adjustments to expected state funding, but those workers are in place now because they were funded temporarily last year.
Taylor said Monday that safety and security requires a lot of things to be in place, comparing efforts to those of an airborne soldier who can only save people if his parachute opens.
““It really is about a culture change, and what I’ve been seeing about school security is our biggest obstacle is a change in people’s behavior,” Taylor said. Improving safety includes setting expectations for behavior, which can be wide-ranging.
He also said others need to consider their own expectations for what the district can communicate in terms of safety, including real-time communication of a safety issue at a school.
Parents also need to be involved in the school and to know the rules, Board of Education Chairman Chris Hegarty said. He cited the case of a child who brought a gun to school for show-and-tell, and it turned out their parent knew about it and gave them permission to bring it.
Parents also need to safely store their weapons at home, something the school system now sends information on home to parents. Many school or other shootings were committed using weapons that belonged to parents, Heagarty said.
“So many of those situations could have been averted on the front end,” he said.
Reacting quickly is critical toward safety but addressing real-time threats publicly is a slower process that requires more deliberation, Scott said. People often want to know exactly why a school is in a lockdown, for instance, and they may be getting texts from people in the building who don’t have verified information.
Scott said information given to the school community, however, must be accurate, and that takes time to ascertain and communicate.
Monday’s safety presentation lays out some of the things the district is already doing, as well their priorities going forward and recommendations from a 2019 security assessment.
Those recommendations include implementing a visitor management system.
That’s something the district put in place last year.
It also mentions installing glass that can better protect against an attack or having consistent door-locking systems.
The district has also recently implemented a clear bag policy for events, the anonymous reporting app ‘Say Something’ for students and the RAVE panic button app.
Heagarty said he hopes the Say Something app — in use by school systems across North Carolina — will yield valuable tips, including related to violence. Previously, the school system had only an anonymous phone line, which it still maintains.
The presentation also lists a host of other things the school system could do, if school board members expressed a desire to do so, such as more fencing, cameras or staff. It also lists weapons detection systems -- a measure that is growing in popularity in North Carolina and beyond but that leaders with the Wake school system have been skeptical would be the most effective use of money.
Officials did not mention weapons detection systems during the meeting. Asked about them and other possible security measures after the meeting, Heagarty said he can’t divulge many safety measures or vulnerabilities, for fear of tipping off would-be bad actors to the school system’s lines of defense or weaknesses.