Panel: Mental health, communication key to school safety

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of two articles addressing how various school districts across the state of Arkansas implement school safety plans. A group of school administrators shared in a panel this week their best practices during the Arkansas Public School Resource Center fall conference in Hot Springs.

Mental health and communication have become key components of school safety, according to administrators from various school districts across the state.

During a panel discussion held Wednesday as part of the Arkansas Public School Resource Center fall conference, administrators from six districts of various sizes and

demographics shared their best practices for implementing safety measures in their districts.

For the Jonesboro School District, Superintendent Kim Wilbanks said mental health has been of key importance in recent years.

“Beginning last year we actually have two employees on our staff that are mental health (professionals) dealing with very difficult students and very difficult parents,” the panelist said. “They actually go into classrooms and help teachers learn better ways to deal with students who are often violent or creating situations that you feel like concern the other students in your building. They are trained in different techniques to diffuse situations and work with students and work with parents. They have been a valuable resource.

“Very often we find children that are creating these problems in your classrooms live in homes where they have parents who are feeding these situations and very often there’s mental health concerns throughout the entire family. We have seen that this is providing some relief for some of our teachers in classrooms.”

Wilbanks said often teachers are not trained to deal with students or parents with possible mental health issues and are left unsure how to help.

“We still have those outside agencies, we have those two, if not three, outside agencies in our buildings who take care of that,” she said of counseling agencies that come into the district and provide services to students and families. “They’re going to be looking for students that can create billable hours and we have children and parents who aren’t billable hours, but they’re highly in need.”

This is where the two trained employees intervene to meet those needs.

“I always remind my people a shooting can happen any day, it can happen at any time,” she said. “But I can assure you we’re going to have a child that’s going to have a meltdown, a breakdown, every single day. We can’t just focus on what if; we’ve got to focus on the known situations that are happening every single day.”

For the Westside School District in Bono, Superintendent Scott Gauntt said communication with parents and restructuring the way the school conducts mandatory fire drills are major pieces of their safety plan.

Gauntt said following the shooting in Parkland, Fla., in February where a gunman pulled a fire alarm before making his attack, his district held a town hall with patrons of the district to discuss its safety plan. Pulling the fire alarm was the same tactic used in the Westside shootings.

“By state law we have to do (fire drills) every month, but what was happening was as we’d do those every month, we’d become so desensitized to what we were doing,” he said. “We went through not only where are the kids going, but we’ve physically walked out of every evacuation plan that we have and noticed that what we were doing was actually counterproductive. We determined that we were actually putting our students into a kill zone a lot of times.”

Now when the district holds fire drills, they alert the buildings over the intercom system prior to the alarm sounding, he said. At any other time a fire alarm sounds, teachers are told to stay put unless told to evacuate.

“If they hear a fire alarm that is not scheduled and we do not come on the intercom and say something, teachers are told ‘Do not leave that classroom until you hear something that allows you to move,’” Gauntt said. “The last time a student was killed due to a school fire was over 30 years ago. People are getting shot daily because the fire alarms are getting pulled.”

Communicating with parents is also a critical part of Lake Hamilton School District’s plan, according to Superintendent Steve Anderson, who said a recent survey showed the majority of patrons feel their children are safe in his district.

“We just did a parent survey and looking at the survey, over 90 percent of our responding parents said they feel their children are safe at Lake Hamilton School District,” he said. “Any time you can get 90 percent of your entire responding public to respond to something in a positive way, we feel like that’s a pretty good thing. We’re open and we work closely with the (Garland County) Sheriff’s Department and with parents, and try to tell them that when they send us their babies, they become our babies and we’re going to take care of them.”

In order to have a successful security plan, the administrators agreed that additional funding will play a key role in that.

“Our school counselors do a wonderful job at what they do and we’re making some changes in our school where they can work more with kids,” Anderson said. “But when we talk about mental health, we’re talking about more than just school counselors. We’re talking about mental health professionals in the area that have more tools and qualifications than just our school counselors. On our campus we have, I think, four outside agencies housed on our campus for those students, but not everyone is that blessed so I think we need to look more at mental health and funding for mental health.”