School district safety addressed at forum

Avon Lake City School District hosted a community safety forum on Feb. 28 in the wake of the Parkland, Florida school shooting on Feb. 14.

Community leaders, parents and other stakeholders gathered at the L.A.K.E. Center at Avon Lake High School at 175 Avon Belden Road.

In recognition of the significance of the tragedy Avon Lake school administrators, members of the Avon Lake police and fire departments along with Mayor Greg Zilka and members of Avon Lake City Council discussed the district’s present safety plan and ways it can be strengthened.

“The shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School last week is a tragedy but unfortunately it was not the first time we’ve had to deal with a tragedy like this in our schools,” Avon Lake City Schools Superintendent Bob Scott said. “Anything thing we can do to comfort the victims of that tragedy we want to do, but we also want to make sure that that tragedy doesn’t happen again and that it doesn’t happen in our community.”

With the district constantly evaluating its safety plan throughout the year, the forum was an opportunity to get feedback from the community and stakeholders for the 3,800 students in seven different schools.

Much of the discussion from residents and administrators about how to build relationships between students, parents and school officials in order to provide a platform for those with concerns to feel safe coming forward including Avon Lake High School Principal Joseph Mueller.

“The best part about Avon Lake City Schools is that we get to know our kids. We get to know their abilities, we get to know their likes and dislikes and we want to communicate and we want teachers to communicate with us about their kids,” Mueller said.

“If a student is capable of learning we’re certainly going to expect that that student will learn and if he or she is not learning and there’s some other behavior that might send up a red flag about some life event or some circumstance we’re going to respond to it, we’re going to intervene and we’re going interact with the family. That’s our best plan.”

Resident Daniel Owens, who has children in Avon Lake Schools, stressed placing more emphasis on strengthening relationships between parents and school administrators.

“It is not necessarily a good thing to focus all of our money and energy into turning a school into a fortress. It’s not good for the kids.” Owens said. “The piece that we need to work on is talking to our children and meeting with school officials.

“We can’t put all of the burden on you guys (school administrators) because we live with our children. In almost all of the cases it was someone who had gone to the school at one point,” he said. “We as parents have to talk to our children. If we want to truly prevent something like this we need to be truly proactive.”

Zilka stressed the need to place trust in our local institutions to keep students while also acknowledging the need to address other problems in our culture that take place outside of school in building relationships through parents and administrators.

“Every kid counts but there are a lot of things we have to just take faith in with the police department and our outstanding school system to manage and do the right thing for the kids their responsible for,” he said.