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By
Kate Tiskus
A security plan to ensure the safety of students is in
developmental stages. Principal Rick Rafter ran down a few of
the measures that will be taken during his kickoff address on
the first day of school, but many more actions have been taken,
he said.
The emergency plan will be finalized soon. Originally developed
in Eugene, Oregon, it is being adapted to suit Polson. It
includes such things as how and when to evacuate the building,
bomb threat procedures, how to deal with intruders on campus,
what to do in the event of fires, explosions or hazardous
material spills.
Rafter initialized the need for such plan last year.
Superintendent Dan Haugen chose the particular plan to be used,
and SRO officer Jay Doyle and assistant principal Dennis Jones
did much of the actual organization leading up to the final plan.
A district-wide committee that included teachers, administrators
and other staff members such as custodians and cooks helped adapt
the plan to Polson, according to committee member Susan Erikson,
a librarian at PHS. Subcommittees dealt with specific sections
of the plan. (See sidebar, page 9, for more information about
each subsection.) A few weeks before school started, meetings
with the emergency providers such as the police and ambulance
services established some of the requirements for a comprehensive
emergency plan. Meetings finalizing the plan took place at the
end of September.
Doyle noted that now is the time for a security plan. "Right
now, if you asked a staff member what the plan is for a bomb
evacuation, nobody would know," he said. "If an
emergency occurs, a lot of pressure is put on staff members.
They can go to this [the emergency plan] and it'll tell them
exactly what to do."
The school is in the process of switching the fire alarms to a
ring/authorization method. Basically, this means that the
building will not be evacuated when a fire alarm sounds until a
special authorization code is broadcast. The reasoning behind
this change has to do with the school shooting in Jonesboro,
Arkansas, where student perpetrators pulled the fire alarm and
gunned down their fellow students as they evacuated the building.
"One of the most important things we've done is coordinating
all of the emergency providers," said Rafter. This measure
includes emergency providers in developing the safety plan, as
well as designating exits so that emergency care providers can
enter or meet at a certain spot.
The school has also developed a plan for evacuating the building,
but don't expect to know the details of it anytime soon.
"Everyone who needs to know, knows," said Rafter,
adding that only faculty members with a direct role in evacuating
students know how and to where they will be evacuated. The
reasoning behind this also ties back to school shootings. Nearly
all of the incidents have been carried out by students in the
school, and administrators don't want to give potential killers a
map of places where their victims can be found.
Students will be evacuated to different areas in different
disasters. Despite the recent media attention to school
shootings, those incidents are relatively rare and should be
prepared for no more and no less than other catastrophes such as
earthquakes and fires, according to Rafter.
In addition to pre-planned areas for the evacuation of students,
the district plan has contingencies for gathering media and
emergency workers. Emergency workers will be stationed at an
intersection near the high school until it is certain that the
building is safe for their entry. Their exact stoppage point
will also determine which streets will be blocked off. Media
members will be held at the New Life Christian Center.
For general information during an emergency, the public
(including parents) should contact the Lake County Courthouse.
For the safety of students and the general public, access to the
building will be limited during a crisis. Rafter commented that
parents should contact the courthouse to find out their student's
staging area and seek them there, rather than at the school
building which may be empty or dangerous to enter.
All of the above measures will be enacted in response to crises
that have already occurred, but Rafter emphasizes that the school
system is equally concerned with prevention of those disasters
which can be controlled. Access to the building during school
hours has been limited to the front entry and the entryway near
Rafter's office, to prevent a threat from "sneaking in"
unnoticed. The outside doors to all classrooms are also to be
locked, so that access to students is very limited. Working
security cameras are mounted in various locations around the
school. Although the film is not monitored live, any misdeeds
caught on tape will be viewed after hours.
Another major change by way of prevention is the school's policy
towards bomb threats. In the past, students were encouraged to
return home while the premises was searched for any evidence of a
bomb or other threat. Now students will be bused to a staging
area and held there during normal school hours. All objects on
school grounds (including vehicles in the parking lot) will be
impounded until it is certain that there is no threat, or that
the threatening object had been found.
This change also has some roots in recent eruptions of violence,
according to Rafter. In the aftermath Littleton, Colorado
incident, pipe bombs and the like were found in student cars.
The new bomb threat measures seek to prevent harm from similar
situations, he said.
Despite all of the measures taken to prevent disasters outright
or limit their damage, Rafter places responsibility in the lap of
students, and believes that there is a risk of violence. "The
most important thing is students themselves. They are the key
payers in this plan," said Rafter, stating that how students
handle daily stress and whether students report suspicious
incidents are two key factors in preventing school violence.
"The code of silence had become the code of conspiracy,"
said Rafter, stating that it is traditional for students to
remain silent about the activities of other young people.
Following this tradition places students who may have been aware
of the instability or even planned violence of their fellows in
the role of accomplice to a crime. In other words, if a student
was aware of a threat to the safety of the school and didn't
report it, that student bears some of the responsibility for the
action because he or she could have prevented it but did not.
Rafter also
emphasized the uncertainty of the times. When queried about the
likelihood of a school shooting in Polson, Rafter replied, "I
honestly cannot answer that. 10 years ago, I'd have told you,
very little, if any. Now, it's unpredictable. I hope we're
doing the things we need to do to make kids understand there's no
need for violence."
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