The Santa Barbara Unified School District is moving forward with comprehensive school safety plans for every campus in the district.
Plans call for an assessment of a variety of conditions, including school crime, suspension/expulsion policies and procedures, teacher notification of dangerous pupils procedures, discrimination and harassment policy, bullying/cyberbullying and a variety of other areas.
Per state law, the district must have the annual safety plans approved by March 1. The district’s trustees will tackle the issue at their Feb. 26 meeting.
“We can’t do this alone and we have to touch on every aspect of school behavior, school safety, discipline and how to respond,” school safety coordinator Kelly Moore said. “We have to have kids who feel safe, parents who feel safe bringing kids to school.
“We have to have a safe community and we have to bring all of this together in order to have a good safety program.”
Moore conducted a safety plan assessment in preparation for the update.
“What I found was a very robust safety plan and it lacked continuity and standardization between all of the sites,” he said.
The plans are designed to improve campus safety and stop violence, but also address day-to-day problems related to bullying, harrasment and personal safety on campus. They also call for “creating a safe and orderly environment conducive to learning at the school.”
Board member Laura Capps said she was impressed with the thoroughness of the district’s process for creating safety plans.
“Sure, they are required by the state, but they are an opportunity to get everyone aligned,” she said. “It feels so much better to know that the plans actually do mirror what’s happening and to make sure the opportunity is not to just check the box because the state requires it, but because we are taking this seriously as an opportunity to get alignment.”
San Marcos High School got a scare Feb. 5 when a student reported seeing a man with a gun in the parking lot. It turned out that the man was holding a radiator hose from his broken-down car. Authorities arrived on campus within three minutes, and Moore said the school and the district learned some lessons from the incident.
“To me that is validation that things are working,” he said. “The culture is starting to shift.”
On the other hand, there were some problems that the district hopes to resolve with an improved safety plan. Some people didn’t believe there was a real threat, Moore said.
“Some of the teachers didn’t take it seriously,” he said. “The students were literally FaceTiming as this was going on.”
The district is also hosting a school safety community forum from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Feb. 21 at La Colina Junior High School, 4025 Foothill Road in Santa Barbara.
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
