Editor’s Note: This is the second in a four-part series looking at “The Things They Face” as students prepare to head back to school. This week: school safety. In part three next week, we’ll examine sexual assault and domestic violence.
The reports of shootings at schools have been frequent in recent years, and while Chatham County has not been affected directly, the headlines have been hard to miss.
Six killed and 18 injured at Rancho Tehama Elementary School on the Rancho Tehama Reserve in California in November 2017. Two killed and 18 injured at Marshall County High School in Marshall County, Kentucky, in January 2018. Seventeen killed and 17 injured at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Valentine’s Day 2018.
School shootings even came to North Carolina during the last school year — a single homicide at Butler High in Matthews, just outside of Charlotte, in October 2018 and two killed and four injured on the campus of UNC-Charlotte in April of this year.
Chatham County Schools has seen some incidents on its campuses in recent years. A hunter shot a deer near a school one morning in November 2017. Two schools went on lockdown in February 2018 when someone stole a vehicle and came near the campus. This March, a threat against Chatham Central High School was made on social media — it was later deemed to be false — but additional sheriff’s deputies were posted to the school and 175 students were absent from the school that had 401 students on its rolls that month.
In light of these incidents, both locally and nationally, both Chatham County Schools and Chatham Charter School have increased security capabilities and sought to reassure teachers, students and parents that when they come to work or learn, all will be well.
Students, according to Chatham County Schools Chief Operations Officer Chris Blice, are an important piece of the puzzle.
“A big piece of it is that we don’t want kids to feel that they’re alone,” he said.
Chatham’s middle and high schoolers haven’t expressed large concern about a lack of safety at school. According to the 2017 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 8.8 percent of Chatham high schoolers said they “did not go to school because they felt unsafe at school or on their way to or from school in the past 30 days” and 3.6 percent of middle schools said they had ever not attended because of safety concerns.
The district recently invested financially in a major upgrade to its security systems. In February, the Chatham County Board of Education contracted with Brady Integrated Security of Greensboro to provide an active database of users with key-card access to the district’s 18 campuses that can be updated in real-time. The system linked into each school’s security camera systems and front-door locks.
But district officials insist that technology is just a part of the solution.
“It really isn’t always about buying stuff,” Blice said. “It’s more about training people and making them conscious, making them aware, giving them options, helping them understand how to handle things. In a crisis situation, i.e. an active shooter, time is lives. The amount of time that individual will likely be shooting people is fairly limited but it’s incredibly disruptive.”
That includes training staff and parents. Chatham Charter School has implemented a safety plan that Beth McCullough, the school’s executive director of secondary programs and communications, calls a “living document.”
“We are always looking to improve what we have,” she said. “We’ve been able to have plans that have adapted and have still been relevant throughout the years from Columbine forward.”
The school first developed its plan with the Chatham County Emergency Operations department and updates it regularly, McCullough says. The school also made upgrades to its door lock system this summer as part of normal tweaking and improvements.
A popular topic of conversation at the state level on school safety is putting a program in place to train teachers to carry firearms to increase security. McCullough said that conversation has not taken place at Chatham Charter, but Blice is blunt on his position.
“‘We’re going to arm you and you’re going to shoot someone’ — I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he said. “Teachers are trained to be teachers. Training you on firearms is not necessarily part of being a teacher. In an active shooter situation, we want our teachers to take care of themselves and the kids. That means lock them down, get them in a safe place in the room, wait this thing out — and we’re training them on some of those pieces. We really want them taking care of the kids more than running down the hall looking for someone to shoot.”
Chatham County’s teachers generally feel safe in their schools, according to results from the N.C. Teacher Working Conditions Survey, which is done every two years. In the 2018 edition, 93.9 percent of Chatham County Schools teachers agreed or strongly agreed that “the faculty work in a school environment that is safe,” and 100 percent of Chatham Charter and Woods Charter teachers agreed with the statement. Just 1 percent of Chatham County Schools teachers “strongly disagreed” with the statement.
Chatham Charter’s “living document” approach is applicable on a campus that continues to expand. The school has made additions to its parking lot and is constructing new athletic fields this year, which extends that safety plan.
“As our campus changes, you have to incorporate that in your safety considerations,” McCullough said. “Our campus has different people with different needs each year. You may have different numbers of students who are driving, people in the car line. There are factors that play into those kinds of things each year.
She added that it takes a team effort — whether that’s at a public school, public charter school or private school — to truly keep students and staff safe in the possibility of an incident.
“Anyone who is in anyway touching your campus and is affiliated with it, it takes everyone to make your campus as safe as possible, and you can never take for granted that nothing will happen at your school,” she said. “Everybody has to be proactive and share information with each other.”
Reporter Zachary Horner can be reached at zhorner@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @ZachHornerCNR.