GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A number of questions hinging on the safety of GRPS students were raised at a forum on Saturday. It comes after a loaded handgun was found in the backpack of a third grader at Stocking Elementary School on May 10 – marking the fourth instance of a handgun being found at GRPS this academic year.
“This is a very tough and challenging time for public education, but I want to applaud you for how we are embracing the needs of our of our schools – in our young people,” GRPS superintendent Leadriane Roby began. “This is a very needed conversation – this is something that we want to make sure that we are doing our very, very best to mitigate any opportunities where children do not feel safe.”
The two-hour forum then went to Larry Johnson, the district’s chief of staff and executive director of public safety.
“Hearing the voice of community, voice of scholars, voice of staff, and the entire community is very important to us,” Johnson said. “This improves student safety opportunity from the state gives us an opportunity to do more coordination with law enforcement, more training around threat assessment and crisis communication… But then we want to look into our infrastructure. Now about 98% of our buildings have a secure entryway. We want to be at 100%. But then we want to layer on top of that, to make sure that we're doing some other things that we think would help make our buildings safe.”
Representative Carol Glanville from Michigan’s 84th House District touted recent legislation like safe gun storage, red flag laws and background checks for gun buyers. The encouragement was short-lived, however, as it does not take immediate effect.
She mentioned a package of school safety bills that are currently on the floor.
“I'm proud to be sponsored one of the bills in that package that deals specifically with creating a uniform program for training and schools around how we that kind of school safety training so that it's not different from school to school or district to district, but rather that it's going to be uniform across the state,” Glanville said. “It will be in conjunction with Michigan State Police. So folks in the buildings, teachers, students, but primarily our teachers and staff, faculty and staff, are responding to incidents or encountering incidents, there'll be a uniform way to respond that the police are also familiar with.”
Jason Russell, a former Secret Service agent who is the founder and president of Secure Education Consultants, also spoke before the Q&A-like session involving parents and educators.
"You know, school best practice has changed over the course of time, if you go back to when I was in school, it looks a lot different than it does now," Russell said. "So we're really trying to really constantly look at what we can be doing for safety and security in schools, but also do it in a way that's measured."
Parents at the meeting said they want to see investments being made to enact change in the district, more than a backpack ban.
"I just almost feel that the education that we put around that and the emotional support would help in not seeing that as tools of criminalizing students, but as tools for providing safety, and inconvenienced children are better than dead children," one parent said.
Another parent criticized the backpack ban that was put into place after the most recent incident involving a gun at Stocking Elementary.
"Stop the backpack ban, implement mandatory classes K-12 that teaches our kids nonviolent conflict resolution, holistic healing methods, aiming to deconstruct the culture of violence in our society by the experts, but not adding to the load of the overworked and underpaid teachers."
That ban remains in place at this time.
Another meeting will be held to discuss school safety in the GRPS district on June 28.
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