Several district leaders in Clark and Champaign counties said Monday they continue to review their safety plans in light of Monday’s shooting in Butler County.
However they said the incident was far enough away that they didn’t need to alter school schedules this week and they believe they have worked hard to improve procedures in recent years, although it’s impossible to account for every scenario.
“We obviously feel bad for that community … These events are just unfortunate reminders of the risk that we all take every day,” said Kraig Hissong, superintendent at the West-Liberty-Salem Local School District.
The Champaign County district doesn’t have school resource officers, but staff members have undergone training on procedures in case of an active shooter.
The district is undergoing a roughly $30 million renovation project so he said district leaders need to be on guard as the layout of the school regularly changes.
“In some ways it creates more confusion, but it also helps keep us on our toes because we’re making sure safety plans of all times make sense,” Hissong said. “Because of that I feel like we’re as prepared as we reasonably can be.”
West-Liberty Salem is also developing an emergency response notification system with the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission to alert law enforcement dispatchers through a single phone call or text more quickly in case of an emergency.
Gregg Morris, superintendent at Clark-Shawnee Local Schools, said staff members at Clark-Shawnee have also undergone active-shooter training. The district locks and monitors its entrances and posts staff members nearby in each building to improve awareness of who is inside.
“We’ve tightened those measures but we are still looking for ways to improve,” Morris said.
The Clark County Sheriff’s Office has provided two school deputies who serve schools throughout the county and are regularly visible, including at Clark-Shawnee.
“It’s certainly something that’s on our mind daily,” Morris said of school safety.
Clark County commissioners recently approved funding to add a third deputy in the county schools beginning this fall, Clark County Sheriff Gene Kelly said. The deputy will likely be trained in June and ready to work when school begins.
Deputies on their beats are also expected to check on schools as part of their daily routine, Kelly said. For example, a deputy assigned to Mad River Twp. regularly stops at Indian Valley Middle School.
The deputies have been trained to respond to various emergencies, including an active shooter situation.
But Kelly said just as important is for them to develop a relationship with students. Ideally if students become aware that a classmate has a firearm, they know where to go for help, he said.
“If a student sees something, we want them to say something,” Kelly said. “We’ve had examples where students have brought pills into schools and the other students have actually walked them down to the principal’s office.”
The Springfield City School District has two resource officers in the high school as well as a third officer who rotates between the middle schools, said Scott Marshall, a spokesman for the district.
It also has a crisis team made of representatives from each district building. In case of an emergency, that team would be notified and decide whether to go on lock down or take other measures, he said.
The district followed the news of Monday’s shooting, but didn’t change procedures, Marshall said.
Ohio law requires all schools to submit emergency safety plans, but a recent change in that law leaves parents and others unable to confirm that their school is following the law.
The Ohio Department of Education collects the emergency management plans. The details of those plans — including response strategies, floor plans, contact information and more — are protected from public view.
But ODE officials said Monday they are no longer allowed to identify schools that are non-compliant with the law. Those could include schools that failed to submit a safety plan, or submitted a plan that didn’t meet the standards.
That news came to light when this newspaper tried to check whether Butler County’s Madison High School and schools in Clark and Champaign counties were up-to-date on the safety plans.
In 2012, the Ohio Attorney General’s office reviewed all Ohio schools and released a list of 145 schools that were non-compliant with the safety plan law, leading to a public outcry and many schools hurriedly filing new plans.
That information is now handled ODE and under the revised law that went into effect in January 2015, spokeswoman Brittany Halpin said a list of compliant or noncompliant districts can no longer be released.
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