Virgina Tech - Lessons for Milford Schools

The tragic occurance at Virgina Tech was a horrible experience, but there are some lessons to be learned from it for Milford.

1. The key lesson to learn is that this could happen anywhere, at any time. It could just as easily have been Milford instead of Virgina Tech. There are people with mental defects everywhere, and they can snap at any time. Therefore, we need to continue to create and implement contingency plans to deal with as many situations as we can envision.

At least since Columbine, the Milford School District has worked each year to upgrade our overall security. There have been a series of initiatives to try to make things safer, and we need to continue to make safety improvements.

Some of the initiatives have been to add video cameras at each school, designing the Heron Pond School to enable effective lock-downs, requiring photo ID’s for everyone at the High School, signing up for the emergency phone system, locking the doors at all schools to limit access, and requiring all visitors to be buzzed in by office personnel.

One significant safety initiative will be implemented soon as one portion of the High School upgrade bond that was recently passed. This renovation will replace most of the doors in the building with new doors and hardware that allows the rooms to be locked from the inside each room. This is a key feature that will enable the school to safely go into an effective lock-down mode. Right now the doors can only be locked from the hallway side, which means that the person locking the door to the room would be exposed to a threat in the hallway. After the renovation, the rooms could be locked from inside the room without being exposed in the hallways. The windows on the new doors will also be limited in size, which will allow them to be covered so someone in the hallway would not be able to look into the room from the hallway.

Perhaps it makes sense to revisit some of our decisions to see if additional security upgrades are warranted. One possibility would be to add a second SRO (School Resource Officer) to the one that we have now. Officer Durham does a great job, but he can only be in one building at a time. He spends most of his time at the Middle School and that seems to work very well. Maybe we need to have another full-time SRO at the High School to be on hand to act quickly in an emergency. Another possibility is metal detectors at the High School. I have been adamantly against them in the past since they have a large operational cost and they don’t work very well, but they do work to some extent and perhaps they would make the difference. It is certainly worth discussing the pros and cons on them again to see if they would help.

2. Another lesson to learn is that it is better to over-react to a safety issue rather than try to find the best solution. There is a lot of second-guessing going on regarding the Virgina Tech response to the initial shootings. From my perspective, it seems that their response of just locking-down the building where the initial shooting occurred was reasonable based on what they knew at the time, but in retrospect, was the completely wrong answer. They would have been much better off if they had hit the panic button immediately instead of trying to be logical.

How does this relate to Milford? I think that it would be a good idea to have the administration make it known to everyone in authority that they should assume a worst case scenario whenever they are confronted with a situation that they don’t understand fully, and to act accordingly. The old saw “it is better to be safe than sorry” really applies to these types of situations. In today’s world, no one is going to second-guess a decision to go into lock-down mode when the evidence that prompted the lock-down is flimsy. Some judgment needs to be applied so that the panic button is not hit indiscriminately, but the message is that one should not try to be too logical and instead should focus on the potential downsides.

3. A third lesson is that we all need to be vigilant regarding potential warning signs that individuals may exhibit that point to future problems. In every population there are people with varying levels of mental problems, and we need to try to identify as soon as possible those that need help. Some people are a danger to others, and some are a danger to themselves. We need to worry about both scenarios and try to make a difference if possible.

I’m not sure what to do about this from a practical perspective. The district does have a solid special education department that works with students with apparent issues, but it is much more difficult to identify those students and faculty that seem to be progressing well on the surface, but have underlying issues that can surface at any time. I guess that the message is that we need to look below the surface, and probe when something seems amiss.