Friday, Dec. 11, was a tense day in the Beach Cities as two separate incidents at area high schools raised fears throughout the community.
A threat against Mira Costa High School, the second within a week, prompted a school shutdown. Two and a half miles away, Redondo Union High School discovered a threat written in spray paint by the school’s student union. As it was quickly assessed unserious, classes at RUHS were unaffected.
But conflation of the events led to panicked, confused parents. The next Tuesday, District 4 councilman Steve Sammarco laid into the Redondo Beach Unified School District for supposed lack of communication and planning against potential threats.
“If there is an active shooter on campus, there is no policy,” he said. “How can we not have a policy for that?”
That assertion is far from the case, said RBUSD Superintendent Dr. Steven Keller. The district has long had emergency plans in place for each school site, which are available for public viewing, he said.
“We’re a district that’s always striving to improve, but we’re never going to have a perfect plan. We have to continue to modify and improve,” Keller said.
To that end, Redondo Union has already moved to install motion-sensing flood lights, new security cameras, and door latches intended to quickly lock rooms in emergency situations.
These additions, which were in the works prior to the graffiti scare, are part of continuing improvements on RBUSD school campuses. Many facilities have been, or are scheduled to be, remodeled to secure and minimize entrances.
“Adams Middle School is a perfect example; you can’t get onto campus without going through the front office,” Keller said. “It’s a nuance that some parents won’t like, but it’s in the name of student and staff safety — that’s the world we live in.”
The incident was a demonstration of the tightening relationship between the district and the Redondo Beach Police Department.
“I think what it’s done for us, is it’s forced a tight collaboration between the police department and the school district,” said RBPD Chief Keith Kauffman, who personally walked to the school from the nearby police station to check in.
Building a relationship with the community and its schools allows for a police presence that creates ease, Kauffman said.
“I’ve always believed that the department’s relationship with schools and the district is one of the primary ones you build trust in.”
Now, police and the district are collaborating on training procedures, which will take place over a number of sessions at each RBUSD school. Training sessions will cover a variety of emergency situations, with emphasis on active shooters.
“It’s a new reality, but if you look at the frequency with which these kinds of things occur, it’s a situation we should maybe be preparing for more than the others,” Kauffman said.
The plan, Keller said, will roll out within the first few weeks of 2016, starting with Lincoln Elementary. “It’s a look at what’s been successful, with new information and training that will impact current standardization of policies.”
While the district works to prevent outsider attacks, the fact remains that many shooting suspects come from within a school — nearly 50 percent are students, teachers, or staff, Keller said. The solution, the district believes, is an emphasis on relationship building on campus.
“If your students and your staff don’t have faith or trust in you, it doesn’t matter how secure your campus is,” said Dr. Nicole Wesley, RUHS Principal.
That trust has paid off. Sprigeo, an anonymous reporting system purchased with RBPD-donated funds, is used by students to report incidents, while Wesley has had students email her to report concerning social media postings.
“The fact that this student felt comfortable doing that, knowing that I’m not going to give up their identity, allowed us to handle it quickly,” she said.
While Redondo Union acknowledges they have improvements to make in the wake of the Dec. 11 scare — there are talks of sending text alerts to parents, rather than just phone or email communications — they feel they’ve already laid a lot of important groundwork.
“All of the equipment, the cameras, they’re all necessary…but the relationships are the primary things that keep us safe,” Wesley said.
