Safety on Campus
In our world today safety on school campuses is foremost in all of our minds. One of the protocols we have in place to keep kids safe is an email monitoring service that functions 24 hours per day 365 days per year. Administration is alerted anytime a student sends or receives an email that contains profanity, threats to self or others, or various other warning signs. Today in the high school we were alerted about an email that contained threatening language. Given how aware we all are about this type of situation we, with the help of our resource officer from Multnomah County Sheriff’s office, detained all of the students in that classroom until we could do our due diligence and establish that this was not a credible threat.
After we established that this was not a credible threat we visited with every high school classroom to educate them about our monitoring practices, to control any rumors about what actually happened, and to remind students that we are a community that keeps each other safe. Students were encouraged to report anything that they are ever worried about immediately. We would rather overreact like we did today then regret our inaction.
We know that detaining a room full of students throughout lunch was an inconvenience, but we would far rather suffer through an inconvenience rather than suffer a tragedy.