July 2017 - School Safety

By Aura Norris, Executive Director of Human Resources and Operations, Perrysburg Schools

We are fortunate here in Perrysburg to have such a safe community, but we also understand that we should not take that for granted. Perrysburg School District makes the safety of our students and employees a priority.

Things have certainly changed over the years. We have had a school district safety committee for almost 20 years, and initially it was focused on minimizing the risk of employee accidents. The committee still does that, but it also has added a focus on securing our schools to keep students and employees safe from external threats. The committee, which meets monthly, includes Wood County Sheriff Mark Wasylyshyn, Perrysburg Police Division Deputy Chief Jim Rose, Perrysburg Fire Inspector Tom Granata as well as both teaching and non-teaching employees from each of our buildings.

In the Permanent Improvement Levy passed by voters in 2015, funds were allocated to construct secure vestibules for each building in the school district. The elementary vestibules were constructed last year, the junior high’s will be built next summer and the high school the summer of 2019. With the exception of Hull Prairie Intermediate School, which we will open next month, all of our schools were designed before the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. We walk that line every day between making sure our schools are welcoming, and making sure that there is a barrier so no one will be able to just walk in without talking to us first. Most public buildings and many office buildings now have some sort of security barrier in place as people enter their facilities.

We study incidents that happen around the country and incorporate the lessons learned into our planning. Columbine brings to mind an extreme situation, but we have been challenged with needing to know how to calm down upset individuals in our offices to keep a situation from escalating and how to respond to hoax threats, for example.

We are vigilant about checking before someone is permitted to pick up a child. Again, it is walking that line of having a procedure in place so parents and guardians can come into the school for a party, but also making sure that someone who shows up unannounced is managed in the correct way. Some parents and guardians are very concerned about safety and would like even more security measures implemented but there are others who would like to see us loosen our procedures. We are charged with keeping up-to-date on the types of threats others are facing and making sure we are prepared.

Each school building has a confidential Emergency Operations Plan that is reviewed annually. Our primary focus is having staff all on the same page, trained well and having a method of communication with which everyone is familiar. We have done fire drills for years—they all know where to go and what to do. This is our new fire drill.

We have security cameras throughout our buildings and all employees are given active shooter training. All schools have a Safety Training Day before school starts each year. We empower individuals to act based on the knowledge we have. We demonstrate the best response to save lives in a range of situations. The Emergency Operations Plan is confidential for a very good reason. Across the country, some standard response procedures have been taken advantage of in situations where, for example, an individual may try to get a building to evacuate and doing so is the last thing we should do.

Perrysburg Schools has a great relationship with the Perrysburg Police and Fire Departments. Even in a non-emergency situation, if something does not seem quite right, we know we can contact them and talk it through. We also debrief with them every time we handle an emergency to listen to their suggestions on how we could do better in the future.

We are pleased to set a good example for our students when they experience the time and energy we put into being prepared, whether that means a lesson plan or what to do in case of fire. The Jacket Way, which was rolled out to all students last school year, creates common expectations for behavior and focuses on the three R’s: Respectful, Responsible and Ready. We are thankful that we do not often have to put our Emergency Operations Plan into action very often, but we are glad we are Ready.