Thurston County schools boost safety measures in wake of shooting

No one was injured when a 16-year-old student fired shots inside North Thurston High School last April.

But South Sound school officials say they’re using it as an example as they work on ways to prevent or respond to similar events.

“I think it was a reminder for us all that it can happen anywhere,” Olympia High School principal Matt Grant said.

Thurston County’s three largest public school districts — Tumwater, Olympia and North Thurston — installed a variety of new safety and security tools over the summer, thanks largely to money that has begun to flow with levy and bond measures voters approved in 2014.

Although plans for some of the upgrades, such as installing video cameras, were already underway, the North Thurston gunman who was tackled and subdued by a teacher after firing shots inside the crowded commons area, along with the October 2014 shooting deaths at Marysville-Pilchuck High School in Snohomish County, have spurred new and deeper conversations concerning school safety, officials say.

The North Thurston gunman remains in custody at the Thurston County Juvenile Detention facility; his trial is scheduled for January.

“It was so close to us,” Olympia superintendent Dick Cvitanich said about both shootings. “We just said, ‘Let’s make sure we do this, and do this well.’ ... Our number one responsibility is the safety of students.”

Some examples of the new security measures include:

New surveillance camera systems in several schools.

Thirty-nine cameras were set up this summer at Black Hills High School in Tumwater, and 110 cameras are being installed at Olympia High School over the next few weeks.

The system at Black Hills replaced about 10 much-older devices that captured black and white footage “that looked like Bigfoot was walking across the screen if you saw anybody,” principal Dave Myers said.

“They were very low quality and you couldn’t tell what was going on,” he said.

The digital cameras provide greater coverage and can be accessed remotely by school administrators on their cellphones and tablets. Myers said the cameras were placed in high traffic areas of the nearly 900-student school, as well as places where kids try to hide when they want to cut class.

“It’s helped a lot already,” he said. “We had some vandalism this summer. It helped us identify who it was and take care of it.”

Olympia High has set up cameras to monitor certain areas of the school on a temporary basis, as issues arise, Grant said. But the idea of a campus-wise surveillance system is new for the nearly 1,750-student school.

“Most schools already have them,” Grant said. “Capital (High School) has had them for quite a long time.”

Avanti High School and Washington Middle School in Olympia also are scheduled to get camera systems, district spokeswoman Rebecca Japhet said.

North Thurston’s middle and high schools already have modern cameras in place, but the district is phasing in new ones in all of its elementary and remodeled schools, North Thurston spokeswoman Courtney Schrieve said.

New safety alarms for buses in North Thurston, and video cameras on buses in North Thurston and Olympia.

“We are about 90 percent complete with the process of getting cameras on every bus and expect the project to be complete very soon,” Japhet said.

Footage from video cameras on buses is often used to help identify bullying, vandalism and student discipline problems.

The alarms require drivers to walk to the back of their buses — ideally, checking each row for kids who might have fallen asleep or stayed in the seats — at the end of a route. Last December, a 6-year-old was left alone on a bus for seven hours, and a preschooler was left alone for two hours in January 2013.

When the driver turns off the bus, the system arms and will sound an alarm if the driver opens a door without pressing a button at the back of the bus.

North Thurston’s bus drivers also received new digital radios. In the past, there were areas along routes in the district that couldn’t be reached because of poor reception.

School buildings with “safe” designs.

Security is a factor in the design for new schools being built in the area, officials say. North Thurston and Tumwater have several schools that are being built from scratch or completely overhauled.

In fact, student safety begins with building design, said Brian Minnich, a Maryland architect who co-chairs the American Institute of Architects’ committee for education.

“It’s not about security and alarm systems, it’s more about the way the building is laid out,” he said.

The trend is to build schools with a single entry, which forces visitors to check in at the front office before they can get to other areas of the school.

Tumwater’s new Peter G. Schmidt and Littlerock elementary school buildings will each have a single point of entry for visitors and a secure vestibule, district spokeswoman Kim Howard said.

Improved entryways also are planned for several construction projects in North Thurston, Schrieve said.

In addition, schools are being designed with more windows than ever, Minnich said.

“The idea is to see and be seen, sort of identifying threats before they get there,” he added. “The whole idea is to give people time to react.”

Modern school buildings are being designed to help “deter, detect, delay and defend” violence or danger, Minnich said. It also is important to have a building that promotes learning and allows students to feel safe, he said.

“The main thing is we want to avoid designing schools that look like prisons,” Minnich added. “Safety is about a feeling of security as much as anything.”

Additional lockdown training, updates of emergency plans and more encouragement for kids to help create safer environments.

Keeping school safety at the forefront isn’t easy, officials say.

Students, teachers and staff members can practice lockdown and active-shooter drills just as they do for earthquakes and fire alarms — but the challenge is getting people to take it seriously, Grant said.

“I think that sense of complacency is really hard to fight because sometimes people feel overly safe,” he said.

This year, the Olympia district is going to be training school staff and students on the latest strategies for dealing with potential intruders or gunmen.

“Fighting is an option now and it never was,” Grant said. “Or if you can get away, run.”

The Olympia School District has scheduled assemblies with Jesus Villahermosa of Crisis Reality Training for all of its middle and high school students this year.

The retired Pierce County Sheriff’s sergeant travels around the country to work with schools on safety issues. In an email interview, Villahermosa said he plans to train students on how to protect themselves during a school shooting. At the same time, he will emphasize the importance of reporting threats and breaking what he calls “the silent witness program.”

“In a 25-year Secret Service study of school shootings, they found that 81 percent of the shooters had told their friends or a sibling of what they were going to do, but no one in any of those researched shootings came forward before the shootings occurred,” Villahermosa wrote. “They all did afterwards, but no one stopped the shooting from occurring.”

Olympia Superintendent Cvitanich said increasing vigilance around safety is the district’s primary goal for this year. He said district officials are updating emergency plans, and examining their policies and procedures around student safety.

“We just decided we would go back and start over and make sure what we are doing is best practice,” Cvitanich said.

Local districts also are taking a closer look at their plans for after a major incident, such as reuniting parents and children. North Thurston district and law enforcement officials talked about their experiences and some of the challenges at a recent training in Chehalis for school administrators in the region.

“We got some ideas and learned a little bit from their experience as far as what we can do to make our place more efficient and safer,” Myers said. “… Ways they would do things over.”

Mike Donlin, program supervisor for the School Safety Center with the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, said Washington is a national leader in school security.

“I really do think we’re ahead of the curve,” he said. “We are considering things like all kinds of man-made and natural disasters ... all of those things that impact safety.”

Some of the biggest school safety trends right now involve technology.

“There’s a lot of work going on all over the place, not just here in Washington, in terms of technologies that will allow for immediate communication with law enforcement and first responders,” Donlin said.

The Tumwater School District is piloting a new program that allows students to anonymously report bullying or threats through social media, email or text. Students have been able to report anonymously in the past, but the new system allows school administrators to directly communicate with the tipsters.

Myers said it’s a system that could save lives.

In December 2013, Tumwater police found three guns, ammunition and possible gunpowder and fireworks in the home of a 14-year-old who allegedly threatened to shoot students at Black Hills High School. The student had researched school shootings, and expressed a “fascination with Columbine,” the 1999 mass shooting at a high school in Littleton, Colorado, investigators said.

Myers, who was assistant principal at Black Hills in 2013, recalled getting a phone call from police on a Sunday notifying him of the situation.

“The system worked,” Myers said last week. “He never made it back to school. We were able to take care of that.”

He said school safety is something that districts can always work on improving.

“I have kids; I’m not worried about my kids being at public school at all,” Myers said. “This is a safe place. ... But how do we look at ways to make it even better?”

But local school officials say they have to figure out a way to handle emergencies, for when the system doesn’t work like it did for Black Hills a few years ago.

“People are choosing to play out their emotional issues in public areas, whether they’re malls, churches, movie theaters or schools,” Olympia’s Cvitanich said. “… We just want to be as vigilant as we can, and have kids know we need to hear from them, and they need to talk to adults so that this stuff doesn’t happen anymore.”

This story was originally published September 5, 2015 at 2:31 PM with the headline "Thurston County schools boost safety measures in wake of shooting."