Wake County Schools

Advisory group: Wake schools should end off-campus dining, improve SRO oversight

The council has been reporting its finding to the committee, often in closed session, in recent weeks.

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Wake County Public School System
By
Emily Walkenhorst
, WRAL education reporter

Wake County schools can be safer with increased oversight of the school resource officer program, not allowing high school upperclassmen to leave campus for lunch and district-wide emergency communications, auditors told the school board this week.

Those were three of the findings of the School Safety Advocacy Council, which the board hired two years ago to review how safe the district’s schools are.

The council has been reporting its findings to the committee, often in closed session, in recent weeks.

On Wednesday, the school board released an executive summary of the report, which does not include school-level details of security risks. The full report is not publicly available.

“We will take this information and synthesize and process and do all of that good stuff and continue to make sure that we make all schools in the Wake County Public School System as safe and secure as possible,” Board Chairman Keith Sutton said.

The council will continue to work with the district on planning responses to the report.

The council’s report concluded that the district needs to standardize professional development related to safety and security.

Selection of school resources officers, training for them and supervision of them was inconsistent, the group found. The group recommended starting a School Resource Officer Operations Committee.

Earlier this year, the district surveyed schools to determine how many school resources officers were in the district and where they were located, at the school board’s request. The district had 75 last school year -- one at every high school, most middle schools and a few elementary schools.

The executive summary did not detail why the council recommended preventing students from leaving campus to eat lunch, but the council generally recommends it for all high schools.

They wrote, “the Wake County School District would be best served to explore this policy in the future with key district staff, the Wake County School Board, and the broader community.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has already prompted the district to suspend off-campus lunch and allowing volunteers on campuses. Students can once again go off campus for lunch and the school board has allowed only essential visitors to return to campuses.

But the report recommended a “visitor management system” for the district. It did not elaborate on what that would be.

During a brief public meeting of the school board’s Safety and Security meeting Wednesday, Curtis Lavarello, the council’s executive director, said “every parent” he’s met doing the safety evaluations across the country agrees that they want open access to campus but “they also realize that today’s times have changed.

“And they also don’t want everyone else to have access to their children.”

In a survey conducted by the council, 90% of district employees said they felt their schools were safe.

But the district can improve school safety by doing several things, the group found:

  • Increasing signage for what people should do in an emergency, such as hallway postings of how to get to a parking lot or the school’s main entrance. The district should also have signs indicating video surveillance cameras are in use
  • District-wide employee safety and security training
  • Having volunteers go through criminal background and sexual predator screening
  • Establishing a district-wide threat assessment team
  • Hiring a security administer for each of the nine area superintendent assignments, a physical security specialist and an emergency manager
  • Starting a security training division, by hiring or through contracting

The safety and security committee was formed last year in response to complaints from students and others about the presence of school resource officers on campus. They pushed for intervention specialists instead, citing racially disproportionate arrests at schools.

The committee voted this winter to continue the school resource officer program under a revised memorandum of understanding with law enforcement that more specifically spelled out when to interact with students.

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