Editor’s Note: Coming into the 2022-23 school year, The Dispatch spoke with public school parents, teachers and staff, as well as law enforcement and other sources, about how districts prepare for active shooter situations. This multi-part series will explore school protocols and training, as well as the costs and benefits of the types of training teachers, students and law enforcement officers receive.
Jesus Gonzales has five children who attend Columbus city schools. Two are in middle school. Three go to Stokes-Beard Elementary.
If a shooter ever entered either of those schools, he said he would rather act on his own to save them than rely on school officials or law enforcement.
“I don’t feel like my children would be safe,” Gonzales said. “… The school or city wouldn’t be able to keep the kids safe. … I live across the street from Stokes-Beard. If anything ever happens, I’m saving the kids, not just mine.”
Just two months ago, a shooter killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The tragedy that grabbed worldwide headlines occurred one week before summer break began there.
For Gonzales, as well as other parents, teachers and administrators in the Golden Triangle, images from Uvalde and concerns for local school safety remain fresh as the new school year approaches.
Since 2018, 194 people have been killed in school shootings and 513 have been wounded. This year alone, 50 have been killed, according to the Center for Homeland Defense and Security’s K-12 School Shooting Database.
The database covers all school shootings that have occurred since 1970, and it defines a school shooting as “every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time of day or day of the week.”
“Until better policies are in place, I will never feel like my kids are safe,” said one parent with two young children in the Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District, who spoke with The Dispatch on the condition of anonymity to shield her children from repercussions. “Access to the kinds of guns being used by teenagers is one of the biggest reasons I won’t feel they’re safe. I don’t recall having received any information about what my childrens’ schools would do in an active shooter situation. It shouldn’t be something on my to-do list, but in today’s reality, I now feel the need to inquire about their plans.”
SOCSD started classes today, while Columbus Municipal and Lowndes County school districts start in early August.
Justifiable precautions
Fortunately, schools in the Golden Triangle have avoided the tragedy of school shootings or a would-be active shooter entering their campuses.
That doesn’t mean those campuses have necessarily been free of weapons or that their students and teachers haven’t faced the realities of gun violence.
At SOCSD, two guns have been found on school grounds in just the last school year, chief school resource officer Sammy Shumaker said.
In one instance, a male student took a photo of himself holding a pistol in the high school and posted the image on social media, along with “WHERE U PLAY U GONE LAY” followed by “mean dat” and a vomiting emoji. The message also included emojis of a blood drop and gun. The student also tagged SHS in the post.
There have been other “toy” guns found at schools, which initiates essentially the same protocols.
“There’s been a host of toy guns, whether it’s BB, airsoft shooting the water projectiles,” Shumaker said. “Make no mistake about it, we caution the students very strongly about that because we don’t know if that’s real or not. You still have ghost guns (homemade guns that lack a serial number, look like toys but shoot dangerous projectiles, sometimes even bullets) out here that look just like those airsoft water projectile. So we take very seriously every incident.”
CMSD has not confiscated any guns on campus over at least the past two years, chief school resource officer Natashea Coleman-Brown told The Dispatch. But four students have died from gun violence outside the school since 2018.
“I can’t speak to, necessarily, the school shootings across the country, but I can speak to what we face here in this particular community with gun violence,” CMSD behavioral specialist Christina Shumpert-Chapman said. “Sometimes (students are) scared, nervous, sometimes even anxious about coming to school, not just students but parents as well. With some of the things that happen, they can be nervous about that, but I’ve found too, oftentimes our students see our schools as a refuge, a place of consistency.”
Protocols in schools
Keeping schools safe starts with protocols, including 2019 state legislation that requires teachers, staff and students to have some kind of active shooter training each year. There are also “intruder” drills to respond to an intruder who isn’t necessarily armed.
Further, SROs — generally a campus’ first line of armed defense if violence erupts at a school — must have at least three years of law enforcement experience before assuming that role. Each campus in area public districts have at least one SRO on site. In Lowndes County, supervisors approved three additional SROs — one each for Caledonia, New Hope and West Lowndes.
If there is an active shooter on campus, the districts issue lockdowns, where classroom doors are locked, students and teachers hide and no unauthorized personnel are allowed in hallways or in or out of the school until the threat is neutralized.
Local law enforcement are contacted to respond to those situations, as well.
If a gun is found on campus, CMSD implements a full lockdown procedure, according to Public Information Officer Mary Pollitz. SOCSD initiates a modified lockdown, where instruction continues where classroom doors are locked and access is restricted in or out of the building, Superintendent Tony McGee said.
CMSD principals are responsible for notifying parents via phone and social media if a campus is deemed unsafe for any reason, Pollitz said. All social media posts come from the official CMSD accounts, which are linked directly on ColumbusCitySchools.org.
SOCSD informs parents of such emergencies through email, phone calls and text messages, per the district’s public information officer Nicole Thomas.
Thomas said parents are immediately registered for the school messaging system when they register their child for school.
“It’s very important that when we are sending those messages to parents that they’re following the information we give them, and it’s also very important that they are only getting their information from an official source,” Thomas said. “The school district is that official source. … If we implement a modified lockdown where everyone is in their classroom and they continue teaching, we notify parents of that. When it’s lifted, we also notify parents of that as well.”
Shumaker said, while he understands that parents might want to intervene on behalf of their children during an active shooter or intruder situation, that’s the last thing school districts need.
“We need parents to help us,” Shumaker said. “We need them to be patient, wait on the school district to make the notifications as to what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, and we need them to follow that protocol. … In case of an emergency, the school district will give them information and the instructions that they need to know and to follow.”
Lowndes County School District, through Superintendent Sam Allison, declined to provide any information to The Dispatch for this report outside of a prepared statement.
“Lowndes County School District’s students and staff are a top priority,” the statement reads. “We meet with local law enforcement officials to improve our school safety efforts. We will add additional SROs to our campuses for the 2022-2023 school year. We want students to feel safe coming to school, and we want parents to feel comfortable sending their children to school. Districtwide, we conduct two lockdown drills per year to practice active shooter protocols with students. Also, our staff completes the Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events (CRASE) training. We will continue our partnership with local law enforcement agencies to evaluate our school safety measures.”
Prevention, communication
CMSD has 24 metal detectors spread across nine schools in the district, and they are run at least three times a week, Superintendent Cherie Labat said.
“We’ve always taken a proactive stance on school safety,” Labat said. “Most of our systems and drills have been implemented in schools across the state for years.”
SOCSD does not have metal detectors but there are metal wands that can be used at special events like graduation and when there is reasonable cause, which is when an administrator has been given reliable information by a credible source, Thomas said.
At the beginning of the 2019-20 school year, SOCSD sent out an email to parents when new legislation, the Mississippi School Safety Act of 2019, was passed to let parents know active shooter drills would take place for students from fifth to 12th grade.
The email also let parents know SROs, school administrators and teachers would help ease anxiety for the drills.
However, there has not yet been an email of that same nature since then sent out to parents because the 2022-23 school year is the first to begin without virtual classes since COVID-19 impacted the 2019-20 school year, when the legislation went into effect.
CMSD hosts regular parent meetings where school safety is consistently brought up, Pollitz said.
“We do parent meetings regularly, and school safety is nearly a topic at every one,” Pollitz said. “We have parent meetings scheduled for (this) week where we will have our chief of police discussing school safety with our parents.”
McGee said he has made sure that every single faculty and staff member in SOCSD stays vigilant in assessing threats the district may face, and with the 21 lives lost in Texas, those within the district are on alert.
“I think it’s like with anything with a sense of heightened awareness — people understand the importance of it,” McGee said. “I made sure that even our bus drivers are aware of it. If you see something, say something. We need to react upon it. We can’t waste time if we know there’s a situation. Our job is to run to it, not run away from it. … It’s a call to action.”
For parents, that fear is still in their minds even though their children may be too young to understand the problem across the nation.
“My kids are still too young to realize we have a problem with school shootings,” the anonymous parent stated. “I’m very aware, and … it makes me very anxious.”
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You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 46 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
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