September 2019 - School Safety

By Thomas L. Hosler, Superintendent, Perrysburg Schools

The Board of Education is asking voters to consider adopting an incremental operational levy to maintain our current level of service to our rapidly growing student body as well as safety and security updates. The Board voted unanimously on July 15, 2019 to place this levy on the November 5, 2019 ballot.

When we consider safety and security updates, we are not just talking about what people see, like the secure vestibules on our schools paid for by taxpayers through our permanent improvement levy, but also professional development for employees and improvements to communications between the schools and first responders, for example.

At Perrysburg Schools, we understand that crisis response is not prevention. There is so much that can be done before a threat shows up at our door. We can better identify students and families in crisis and continue to strengthen our mental health services. We also must be prepared for a range of types of emergencies, such as active shooter, allergic reaction, bomb threat, CPR/AED, fire, playground accidents, school bus accidents, suspicious person and tornado/weather.

Perrysburg Schools currently pays 100% of the cost of the School Resource Officer stationed at Perrysburg High School. We would like to add an SRO at Perrysburg Junior High School. This is not just a police presence to ensure a fast response if there is a crisis. SROs get to know students, work with them and address many situations before they get to a crisis level.

We would also like to offer additional training, focused on tabletop exercises and age-appropriate, school-wide drills involving students, employees and first responders. These would be based on the ALICE training model, which stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate. ALICE is a set of proactive, options-based strategies that incorporates recommendations from the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Department of Education and multiple law enforcement agencies.

This work that we would like to do to enhance safety and security dovetails with work currently under way in the school district. For example, two existing administrative positions were restructured last school year to establish a Director of Student Services and Well-Being position in the Pupil Services Department without adding any positions or any additional cost.

Another example is the Perrysburg Parent Safety Task Force, which was formed last year to facilitate and grow communication from the school district to families and from families to the school district, develop ongoing community partnerships, encourage school safety training and education and offer ideas, action and policy recommendations. The Task Force has a representative available at each school and communicates regularly with families.

We live in a changing world, where tragedies like Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Parkland have occurred, where bullying, online predators, social media issues, active shooters and domestic violence are now part of daily conversations in school districts across the country.

Our philosophy is that we cannot have a drill for everything; we must empower employees and students to take in information and react. We cannot just have a flip chart or a poster on the wall. We focus on prevention as well as crisis response planning.