On Feb. 14, we lost another 17 students and educators in a mass shooting in a public school. We watched images of kids running terrified from a place they should feel safe and heard gunfire on cellphone video showing children hiding in classrooms where they should have been studying geometry or discussing their latest reading assignment. Our hearts and prayers go out to the Majory Stoneman Douglas High School community in Parkland, Florida.
In the aftermath of this horrific tragedy, we couldn't disagree more strongly with President Trump and the National Rifle Association that the key to student safety is putting more guns in our schools or "hardening our schools," turning them into prison-like fortresses. Our schools should be places of learning, exploration and joy where we celebrate our kids' growth. They should never be hardened bunkers bristling with firearms.
For too many of us in Denver Public Schools, school shootings are not horrors that happen somewhere else. Our director of counseling services, Samantha Haviland, survived Columbine. Our chief of safety, Mike Eaton, texted with his son as the boy huddled with his class in a closet for more than two hours while a gunman roamed his high school, Arapahoe High School in Littleton.
We know how vitally important it is that we do everything possible to keep our students and educators safe. Every school has an emergency team who undergoes special training and an emergency plan. Every staff member is trained in four standard protocols -- lockdown, lockout, evacuate and shelter in place. Every student goes through three types of drills -- lockdown, lockout and shelter in place -- within the first 30 days of each semester. Every month, students practice evacuation during fire drills.
And, every threat we receive is investigated thoroughly by Denver Police school violence detectives and our Safety team.
We have a security team of 135 who work around the clock to keep each campus in our city safe. About a quarter of the DPS Safety team are armed. Another 15 Denver Police officers, also armed, are stationed in our schools. We have invested, thanks to our bond program, in significantly upgrading the security of our schools and are able to remotely secure any school within seconds.
We know how necessary and important these things are, and yet there is a level of pain and anguish that these are the kinds of activities we're conducting in our schools with our teachers and our kids.
The day after the shootings in Parkland, Florida, during our public board of education meeting, I talked about an emotion I felt in addition to pain and sorrow -- anger. I am angry that we create this level of risk to the health, safety and lives of our students because we allow easy access to murderous assault weapons.
I urge all of us to raise our raises to push to make the changes that are so necessary, including limiting access to weapons of war. Automatic weapons should have no place in our society -- not among students nor among adults. Yes, I want more resources for mental health supports in our schools but we need to be clear that the reason our country has so many more school shootings than any other is not because other countries' mental health supports are better than ours -- it is because they have different gun laws.
Finally, it is important to note that every single threat or weapons report our security team has investigated so far this year has come because of the relationships that have been built between the children and adults in our schools, through students reporting concerns in person or through reporting systems such as Safe2Tell.
Please encourage your children if they have concerns to talk to a school counselor or call Safe2Tell at 1-877-542-7233 (SAFE). This can be done anonymously.
In the aftermath of yet another mass shooting in a public school, let's work together on solutions that will keep our kids safe and our classrooms the places of learning, exploration and joy they were meant to be.
Tom
Pictured above: Students from Hallett Academy.
