Just how good are the safety measures, policies and procedures in Powell schools?

That’s what Park County School District 1 hired West40, Illinois’ regional office of education School Safety and Threat Assessment team, to find out.

The agency brought four people to audit Powell’s 11 school buildings Sept. 9-12.

“We look at four different avenues,” said Randy Braverman, West40’s school safety and threat assessment specialist, at the Sept. 10 board meeting. “We look at deterrence, which is just discouraging unauthorized actions. We look at detection, recognizing unauthorized actions, delay, slowing unauthorized actions, and response, reacting [to] unauthorized actions.”

Braverman rattled off a comprehensive list of things that would be analyzed in each category all the way from things like plant height (to avoid concealment) to the more traditional and obvious like door locking procedures and law enforcement response time. 

Within 30 days from now PCSD1 will receive a report with a list of priorities in order of importance for the district to consider implementing.

“It's just recommendations, what we think are best practice, and we're going to give you best practice. It's up to you guys, if you want to take that best practice or not,” Braverman said. 

He added that the recommendations can be altered to the school’s needs and means — in his many years of experience and assessments he has never seen a school complete every recommendation within a year, he said.

At the end of Braverman’s presentation a trustee raised the question of whether or not teachers should have the option to arm themselves in schools.

Arming staff?

“My question is on the state level, this next year, we’re probably going to be arming teachers, that's what it sounds like at state level … but are you seeing more schools going towards that where teachers that have the ability to arm themselves,” Trustee Dusty Paul asked.

Whether or not teachers have the ability to arm themselves is dependent on the state, Braverman responded. In his area schools are not going that direction, he said, adding that he’s not saying whether it is good or bad to arm teachers but there have to be policies and procedures. Braverman offered the example of an armed teacher possibly being confused as the threat by police — they need to be wearing something identifying, he said.

“We have to have things in place if you’re going to do that, to make sure everybody’s safe, the police officers, teachers and that stuff,” Braverman said.

While he has not seen more schools adopt carry policies, what he has seen are schools increasing the amount of school resource officers. 

“My philosophy is this, they're professionals, we're trained to do that,” said Braverman, a former SRO and police officer. “If you want more guns in school, and you could hire more SROs … a lot of time police departments just don’t have the manpower to do it, right? But if they did, I’d like to see more SRO’s in the building.”

Good SROs are not there to arrest anybody, Braverman said, they’re there to educate and train students. 

“If you have a good SRO, they're here to help the kids,” Braverman said. “If you don't have enough police officers, then you have to do what you have to do.”

In Illinois, they only have one instance where a member of school staff is armed, he added — a superintendent of a rural school was armed and made a police officer due to a 30-minute response time from the nearest police force. 

“I'm not saying [arming staff] is right or wrong,” Braverman said. “I'm just saying I'd rather have more SROs, because I think they're valuable.”

A community member weighs in

A member of the Powell community, Mark Phipps, also weighed in on the discussion during public comment. He complemented the board and auditors for taking school safety seriously and supported the idea of school staff having the option to carry arms. While also noting that signage as Braverman mentioned, is an important aspect of school safety. Signs that say the schools are protected are a big piece, he said. He also noted that Cody already allows teachers to carry and legisaltion on firearms in schools is likely coming. 

“I think that Powell schools should go ahead and put policies in place so that way you're not being told by the state what to do or how to do it; being underfunded, not evaluating properly, not going through and doing the proper training, then you're under their their policies, whereas if we have policies here at Powell schools, those policies are controlled by us, by our board, by our administration,” Phipps said.

Last year’s bill would have allowed for schools to implement policy and procedure regarding their own staff as long as it met the minimum requirements laid out by state law. 

The board has not yet held actionable discussions on what a concealed carry policy might look like outside of briefly discussing whether or not to look into drafting one ahead of this year’s legislative session during an August meeting. 

PCSD1 will discuss West40’s findings at a future workshop meeting, which takes place on the fourth Tuesday of every month. For more meeting information visit pcsd1.org/page/board-of-trustees.