District examines safety narrative

CEO says district will work with city

Lorain City School district is examining ways to change the narrative in the wake of recent concerns about school safety.

In a community forum held at Lorain High School, Lorain City Schools CEO David Hardy Jr. announced several steps to be taken to address communication gaps in the community in the wake of concerns about school security.

At the community level Hardy pledged to hold weekly meetings with city leaders to review school behaviors and incidents in the community and within the school. In addition, the district is in the process of reviewing school safety plans and getting feedback from Lorain Police Chief Cel Rivera. School leaders are working with city and community leaders on creating and maintaining a safe community.

Rivera and Hardy announced the Lorain Police Department would create a specialized task force to support school security focusing.

Rivera said the two-fold strategy would seek to address factors that create violence in our schools and would emphasize intervention for youth with involvement from the city and local non-profit organizations.

Rivera added the department will look to re-energize the interest of other partners and the juvenile court system. He wants the City of Lorain to play a major role.

“We talk a lot about the kids being our future but we don’t support them with public policy or public funds,” Rivera said.

The police chief wants to see more programs targeting youth come back, providing more opportunities for young people.

At the school level, Hardy pointed to initiatives aimed at involving scholars directly in the conversation and increasing scholar voice along with reviewing school safety procedures.

“We need to spend more time understanding our kids. There’s no denying that the conversations that we have with adults are important. There’s no denying that understanding the relationships that adults have to create in learning is important,” Hardy said.”

“But our kids have so many answers to so many of our problems. And I think for a long time we haven’t included their voice in the process. We haven’t asked them to speak up. We have not asked them to tell us what they need and I think it’s time we listen to them.”

In the past week Lorain High School has dealt with three incidents including a false Level III lockdown on Sept. 25, a Level II lockdown on Sept. 26 following a shots fired incident and a concerning Snapchat post on Sept. 27.

On Sept. 28 Hardy was joined by community stakeholders including Mayor Chase Ritenauer, Rivera, Lorain Safety Service Director Dan Given along with the Lorain City Schools Board of Education and the Academic Distress Commission in a two hour meeting aimed at addressing security.

“It really forced us to have this conversation around the community and school connection that this is the role of not only the leadership within the school but also leaders in the community that work together to allow in a fashion to allow us to address the needs that we are seeing,” Hardy said.

He added it was the collective responsibility of the community to come together and find solutions that work for everyone involved.

“When we think about all the wonderful things that happen in our community those ‘did you hears’ often trump the reality that happen in school every single day and we don’t get to realize this beautiful orchard of wonderful apples,” Hardy said. “There’s a lot of good things that happen in our school and a lot of things that our kids do every single day that need to be celebrated and need to be the headlines on tv and the headlines in the papers.”

However, Hardy stressed the positive things happening in Lorain City Schools wants to focus energy on finding ways to support scholars and teachers.

In recognizing there are improvements to be made, Hardy said the narrative being portrayed by the media is providing an inaccurate picture of what is happening and this perception is becoming the sole narrative rather than just a situation that needs to be dealt with.

“We know in our schools we have to do a better job of handling some of the misbehaviors that we see, there’s no denying that. But it has become the narrative versus a situation we need to address,” Hardy said.

So as these situations come up and these misbehaviors might be happening we’re seeing negativity spewed across newspapers, we see people jumping on television in front of television stations and saying here’s the things that are happening in our schools and people take that as the reality for all of our schools and the narrative becomes pervasive.”

“We talk a lot about the kids being our future but we don’t support them with public policy or public funds.”

— Police Chief Cel Rivera