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How Safe is Your Child's School?

Posted on: Monday, 17 April 2006, 15:00 CDT

By Blake Herzog, The Tribune, Mesa, Ariz.

Apr. 17--Few things can be as unsettling as seeing a police car parked in front of your child's school, and having no idea why it's there.

Seven years ago this week, the Columbine High School massacre claimed 15 lives in Littleton, Colo., fueled parents' nightmares, and left many parents thirsty for information about any threat to their child's safety.

"Any time emergency vehicles are at a school and parents may wonder what happened, we would typically send a letter home to tell them what happened," said Kathy Bareiss, spokeswoman for the Mesa Unified School District.

Bareiss guesses the district's community relations office puts out upward of 60 letters to parents per year telling them about everything from air-conditioning outages to school lockdowns as police search for a suspect in the neighborhood.

If a campus has a school resource officer assigned to it, the officer's police car could be as much of a neighborhood fixture as a school bus or a security guard's golf cart.

An officer also could be called in to assist in a custodial dispute or other domestic matter that doesn't involve more than one family.

Of course, it could also be something more serious involving student misbehavior, if nothing on the scale of the Columbine disaster.

Bareiss said in nearly every case the school principal should be able to offer at least some facts about the incident, though information may be sketchy because of federal laws regarding student confidentiality

Ken Trump, president of Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services, said most campuses have at some point assembled an on-site crisis team and emergency plans, but parents need to make sure these aren't mere artifacts of the post-Columbine era.

"A lot fewer are training their staffs, and a lot of their plans are sitting on a shelf somewhere," he said.

For information on how to make sure your child's school is safe, visit

www.schoolsecurity.org

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Tribune, Mesa, Ariz.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

Source: The Tribune

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