School security has many different looks, but it remains a constant focus, officials say

For school administrators, there’s not a single subject more serious than keeping their buildings and students secure and safe.

“It’s the most sobering part of my job,” said Justin Milner, the associate superintendent and chief operating officer of Norman Public Schools. “It’s something we think about 24/7, today more than ever.”

As the 2024-25 school year starts across Oklahoma, districts are constantly devising and working on ways to keep kids safe — not just from intruders, but also from storms, especially with strong memories of the mammoth 2013 tornado that destroyed two elementary schools in the Moore Public Schools district and killed seven students at Plaza Towers Elementary in south Moore.

Security improvements range from the simple — door locks, fencing and cameras — to higher-ticket items such as school resource officers, or SROs, and building additions.

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The Deer Creek school district has used a $45,000 grant its foundation received from convenience store chain Casey’s to help the district start to purchase safety devices for more than 1,200 doors throughout the district in northwest Oklahoma County.

Alex Looper, the Deer Creek foundation’s executive director, said its goal is to raise $100,000 toward paying for the safety devices for vital doors at school sites.

“We are grateful to receive a Cash for Classrooms grant from Casey’s and are excited to announce that we have reached 76% of our fundraising goal,” Looper said. “The needs of our district are ever-evolving, but a consistent top priority for all of us as a district, foundation, parent and as a community is safety — especially when it comes to children.”

In addition to fundraising, districts also use school bond proposals to fund security enhancements. Almost every such proposal, no matter the size of the district, now includes some sort of security component. For Western Heights Public Schools in southwest Oklahoma City, its first bond proposal since 2017 focused almost entirely on security.

Western Heights Superintendent Brayden Savage said the bond money is being used to update security cameras for the first time in 10 years, to add fencing around the district’s high school/middle school campus and repair gates around most of its campuses. She said the work should be completed by early November.

“We need to be as safe and secure as we can, and we are always looking at our plans for that,” Savage said. “It really is a necessity. We always need to be assessing it, because every day, technology changes.”

She said the district plans to prepare another bond proposal for 2025 that will allow Western Heights to add entry vestibules to its schools that do not have them.

New technology includes devices that resemble metal detectors used in airports or entryways to major public buildings like the Oklahoma state Capitol, but are less intrusive, allowing for speedier entry into school facilities for students. Wayland Cubit, the Oklahoma City Public Schools’ security director, said that district will expand its use of those devices this year in an effort to keep weapons from making it into schools.

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“This is a system designed just to detect weapons, so it doesn’t go off on keys, it doesn’t go off on phones, it doesn’t go off on belts and other metal objects,” Cubit said. “It’s just designed to identify weapons.”

The 2023 bond passed by Norman voters included $5.711 million for district-wide security enhancements. It also included money for classroom additions at eight elementary schools, as one of the district’s primary goals is to take students out of portable classrooms detached from the main school building and put all students under one roof, a setup Milner said is preferable for security reasons.

A 2019 Norman bond issue paid for the addition of storm shelters at 16 districts schools that did not have one. The final shelters recently were completed. Other districts, including Moore Public Schools, have worked toward the goal of having a shelter in every school.

Recent legislation has helped some schools begin, or expand, SRO programs

There also has been a push for more school resource officers, especially after the Oklahoma Legislature approved two bills, House Bill 2902 and House Bill 2903, that created a pilot program known as the School Resource Officer Program. The measures provided every Oklahoma district with about $93,000 toward hiring an SRO and making security enhancements. By definition, SROs are sworn law-enforcement officers.

Savage said before the bill became law, Western Heights had no SROs. Now it has two, who float around all of the district’s campuses while focusing on the middle school and high school.

“It’s been a game-changer,” she said. “It has very significantly helped us. It’s just a different feel when you have an SRO as opposed to having a security staff.”

Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Brandon Hendrix has spent much of his career as an SRO and is the vice president of the Oklahoma Association of School Resource Officers. He said the goal of the two bills was “to give schools that are underfunded and don’t have the ability (to pay for SROs) some security.”

He said the role of the SRO often is misunderstood: “We’re not there to arrest the kids. We’re there to be a positive role model and build relationships before something violent happens.”

Hendrix said SROs are sworn officers, but also serve as counselors and mentors who help resolve issues with students “and direct them to the right services.” He also said SROs often are “law-related educators” who “go into classes and explain how law enforcement came into existence, constitutional rights, things you can get in trouble for, differences in types of law enforcement. We encourage them to be educators.”

Milner said while a lot of security measures that districts establish aren’t in the spotlight, parents should be assured that keeping kids safe is top of mind for school administrators. He said security encompasses a wide variety of measures not often thought about, such as counselors to support children through traumatic events and mental-health issues.

“I don’t think a lot of people … realize the full burden or challenge that we have in education to support the whole child and the feeding and the clothing of the students,” Milner said. “It’s the one thing that unites us all.”

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: School security has many different looks, but it remains a constant focus, officials say