About 20 percent of Clark County School District (CCSD) students report they do not feel safe at school. So far, in the 2018-19 school year, 14 guns have been recovered on CCSD school campuses.
In an effort to engage the community to improve school safety, Superintendent Dr. Jesus F. Jara announced the formation of a School Safety Advisory Committee, which included community members, elected officials, faith leaders, school principals and police officials. The committee examined all aspects of school safety, explored research, expert positions, and cost, and formulated short-term and long-term recommendations, which were provide to the Board of School Trustees in December.
Here are the recommendations that CCSD will focus on in the coming months:
• Require mandatory reporting of every CCSD firearm incident and make the report easily accessible on the CCSD website.
• Strengthen community awareness of SafeVoice, which was launched this school year and gives people throughout Nevada an anonymous way to report threats to the safety or well-being of students. Students, parents and employees have already been using this system. From August through December 2018, CCSD received 3,715 SafeVoice reports.
• Appoint a community liaison from CCSD to work with the Mayor’s Faith Initiative on gun violence and responsible gun storage, utilizing existing community resources to attain safer school campuses.
• Provide crisis response training for students and staff including “active situation” training.
• Require students to wear student IDs on breakaway lanyards.
• Implement optional Socio-emotional Learning Curriculum (SEL) to engage all students, and deter disengagement from school and community ideals.
• Improve overall campus security by improving security cameras or installing security access doors at schools.
• Increase School Police staffing.
• Commit to conducting a basic school safety assessment at every school.
• Create eight K-9 Units trained in firearm detection.
