Kenston Schools Address Safety and Security
The topic of school safety was once again front and center at Kenston Schools Board of Education meeting April 17.
The topic of school safety was once again front and center at Kenston Schools Board of Education meeting April 17.
“I want to get the message out that even though there’s a national incident or a local incident like we’ve had here recently, that kind of heightens the awareness,” said Jeremy McDevitt, assistant superintendent of business operations and strategic initiatives. “Behind the scenes, we are working year-round evaluating our procedures, evaluating our plans and looking for funding sources to add to our security here at the district.”
McDevitt said he and Kenston Superintendent Steve Sayers met with Bainbridge Township Police Chief Jon Bokovitz to debrief after the shooting scare at West Geauga High School April 3 in which a student was arrested for bringing a handgun to school with intent to shoot multiple students.
“Anytime this stuff happens, Chief Bokovitz has been very supportive — he comes in and spends some time with us to talk through some of the things that happen locally and nationally,” McDevitt said.
The district has also had vulnerability assessments conducted by outside agencies in the last five years, he added.
“A lot of this we don’t make public all of the time. They come in, they assess each building, they assess our campus and give us a full report on where our vulnerabilities are,” McDevitt said. “You can imagine why we don’t share that report publicly because we don’t want to advertise our vulnerabilities, but those types of reports and those types of assessments help us as a school district take a hard look at ourselves and kind of focus where we want to make improvements.”
McDevitt said an annual review of the district’s emergency operation plan, which has to be submitted to the state, will be coming up.
“That is not a public document, but it gets reviewed annually and is a very large document that the state has on file from our school district talking about various safety security procedures,” McDevitt said, adding, “The submission happens every three years” and the district receives feedback on whether they are in compliance with state requirements.
“They point out areas where it’s not meeting their standard, but we’ve been in compliance every year since this started,” he said. “The newest thing actually announced two or three years ago was House Bill 123, which had the requirement that all school districts establish threat assessment teams.”
McDevitt said the threat assessment teams are for grades six through 12.
“In this district, we’ve trained and now have a threat assessment team at the middle school and also in this building here at the high school,” he said. “All of the threat assessment information will also be submitted to the state for review.”
McDevitt said he spoke with training officer Doug Smith of the Ohio Safety Center last month for feedback.
“Him and I just dialogued about what services he can offer the school district from the Ohio Safety Center,” McDevitt said. “We’re going to pursue some of the stuff with him coming up down the road.”
He said the biggest message he can get across is safety and security are being looked at constantly.
“It’s always in the back of our mind and it’s something that we work on behind the scenes continuously as a district,” he said.
