We ‘don’t live in Mayberry anymore.’ Security changes could be coming to Wake schools
Security changes could be coming to Wake County schools that may make campuses less accessible to the community.
The Florida-based School Safety Advocacy Council on Wednesday presented findings of a security audit of the Wake County school system and its individual schools. The security consultants said they’re recommending changes that are meant to better protect students and school employees without turning campuses into prisons.
“We do not believe schools should look like prisons,” Sean Burke, president of the advocacy council, told the school board’s safety and security committee. “We do not believe in that. We believe that they should be open, they should be part of the community as much as they can within limitations.”
The specific recommendations were discussed Wednesday in closed session under an exemption in the state’s Open Meetings Law for school safety issues.
Concerns rise over school safety
The group signed a $728,995 contract in July 2019 to assess the safety of every school and administrative building in the county.
School safety has become more of a concern since the February 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
This school year has seen multiple hoax threats made against schools in Wake County and throughout North Carolina. Fears have also risen following two shootings in August in high schools in Wilmington and Winston-Salem that left one student dead and another injured.
A student at Enloe High School in Raleigh was found on campus with two guns in early September.
“We unfortunately don’t live in Mayberry anymore,” Burke said. “There are certain threats to our children, there are certain threats to our schools, to our staff that have to be addressed.”
Building relationships with students
As part of the security audit, the group visited every school.
Curt Lavarello, the group’s executive director, said he was impressed by how much he and his employees were regularly stopped by school employees, parents and school resource officers asking why they were on campus.
Lavarello said he was also impressed by the level of interaction that school employees had with students throughout the school day. He said those relationships are an important part of keeping schools safe and deterring violence.
“We don’t stop a lot of school shootings because we’re carrying AR-15s or any of that stuff,” said Lavarello, a former school resource officer. “We stop a lot of school shootings in this country every single day because we know our kids, and that’s where we have the greatest opportunity to continue to do that.”
Lavarello also praised the school district’s security department and said the district enjoys a good relationship with area law enforcement agencies.
Reviewing the security changes
Russ Smith, Wake’s senior director of security, said a district committee will review the recommendations from the audit.
Lavarello said they’re not going to recommend things “that will make you sit back and shake and shudder over thinking that your district’s going to look like something that it wasn’t before.”
But Burke said that people should be prepared for changes that mean schools may no longer be as open as they are now.
“We can still assure parents that your child is the safest with these changes that we are going to make, and these changes aren’t taken lightly,” Burke said. “They’re taken in light of your child’s safety, your employees’ safety, teacher safety. Unfortunately there are just real-world decisions that are going to have to be made.”
This story was originally published September 30, 2021 at 7:45 AM.
