PHOENIX — Educators and law enforcement teamed up once again on Thursday for the second annual Southwest Valley School Safety Coalition summit to discuss new ways to ensure students are safe in the classroom.
”It’s really a collaborative effort to ensure school safety isn’t just a school issue, that it’s a community issue and we’re all in this together to ensure our kids have the best environments possible and the safest environments possible,” Carter Davidson, Superintendent of Litchfield Elementary School District told ABC15.
It's a collaboration between law enforcement, the student body, educators, and of course, parents to build a relationship so all channels of communication are open.
“That’s the most important thing. I’m a police officer, I’m there for safety but I want you to know I’m just a regular person and we can have a conversation and we can be friendly,” School Resource Officer Dwayne King said.
That communication is exceptionally important as social media continues to be a growing presence in students' everyday lives.
“Because often it’s happening out of sight, it’s critically important to have really strong relationships with our students if they see it, they hear it, they say it — they bring it to a trusted adult,” said Betsy Hargrove, the superintendent of Avondale Elementary School District.
Educators went through different training seminars, listened to guest speakers, and talked about different technological advances and initiatives that could add another security level in the continued effort to provide a safe school environment.
“With weapons detectors, with various cameras, we have vape detectors — cause that’s another thing, drugs in [schools]. That’s been a problem as long as drugs have been around, so that’s not a new issue but it's a new way to combat it,” said Trey Terry, a governing board member at Agua Fria Union High School District — one of the first in the area to implement weapons detectors.
“12 months prior to us implementing the weapons detectors, we had at least seven incidents of a gun on our campus that we knew about and since then we haven’t had a single one. It has been over a year that we’ve had them at every one of our campuses,” Terry said.
We’re told more school districts in the area are looking at the technology, while continually assessing what other security measures may be needed.
