Woman threatens to shoot teachers/kids at my kid's elem scho

[Mama Abby]

My daughter and the neighbor's little girl told me that Friday afternoon their school was on lockdown. I asked them what happened, they said they didn't know but the teachers were told to lock the door, turn out the lights, and get out of sight. Both of them said their teachers armed themselves with a big pair of scissors in their back pockets. Yeah you read that right, scissors. A woman who's kid had been taken by CPS was threatening to shoot up the school and the teachers grabbed scissors. The school is 2 miles from the police station, and yet the woman was able to get away before the cops could get there. I am so angry. I plan on going to the next school board meeting and also petitioning for armed security.


http://www.kxxv.com/story/23614477/moth ... Id=9381578" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[jmra]

Scary stuff.

[Jumping Frog]

That in a nutshell is why I have set my sights on getting on my local school board, with an announced platform of allowing CHL's (parents and staff) to carry concealed.

[C-dub]

If scissors is the best weapon on hand, then you do the best you can with what you got. Although, I wish they could have better.

[gthaustex]

What a shame. I feel most sorry for the child in this instance.

[Cjwglock19]

I tell you what is sad, Teachers in this district and were not informed of what happened until they saw it on the news!

[Redneck_Buddha]

Shelter in place = commit suicide.

[Sangiovese]

Although scissors are not the ideal weapon, I'm glad to hear that the teachers armed themselves with whatever they could get their hands on. It shows that they were ready and willing to fight to protect the children in their care.

I will take a poorly armed person with the will to fight over someone who isn't prepared to fight, no matter how they are equipped.

[chasfm11]

It amazes me that banks have silent alarms to notify the police and that schools do not. In this day of technology, surely this is some way to rig something that is the equivalent of a panic button for the school. While I understand that news stories seldom get the time line correct, it appears that many minutes passed between the woman's initial contact with the school and the principal trying to explain the situation to her. Police needed to be rolling as soon as she started displaying errant behavior. Where is the zero tolerance policy?

Like others, I'd much prefer to have armed teachers or volunteers in the schools for situations just like this. There is no reason for anyone but the police to engage such a person but if she did have a gun and started toward the school buildings with it, there needs to be a way to stop her until the police arrive.

[jmra]

It amazes me that banks have silent alarms to notify the police and that schools do not.

IMHO, I'm not sure that a bank and a school is a fair comparison. Bank robberies are so common that they barely make the news anymore. Despite the media sensationalism, incidents at schools which require a response by a police department are pretty rare.
Would I like to be equipped to immediately respond to a threat at a school? Absolutely. Would a silent alarm at a school get a quicker response from police than the 911 speed dial button on the receptionist phone? I doubt it.
Even with silent alarms at banks the police usually arrive after the fact.
I believe the best option is a LEO presence on campus during school hours. That's the way it is on all of our campuses and we only receive 70% of the funding a regular ISD receives. If we can afford it, any school can.

[chasfm11]

It amazes me that banks have silent alarms to notify the police and that schools do not.

IMHO, I'm not sure that a bank and a school is a fair comparison. Bank robberies are so common that they barely make the news anymore. Despite the media sensationalism, incidents at schools which require a response by a police department are pretty rare.
Would I like to be equipped to immediately respond to a threat at a school? Absolutely. Would a silent alarm at a school get a quicker response from police than the 911 speed dial button on the receptionist phone? I doubt it.
Even with silent alarms at banks the police usually arrive after the fact.
I believe the best option is a LEO presence on campus during school hours. That's the way it is on all of our campuses and we only receive 70% of the funding a regular ISD receives. If we can afford it, any school can.

that an LEO presence is a better solution. But we don't seem to be moving very far, very fast in getting to that point.
In the mean time, situations like this one develop. While I admit that the story's reporter might have the timeline wrong, there seems to have been a delay between the woman's initial confrontation with the school and when the police were actually called. Like the bank teller facing a robber, the opportunity to make the 911 call might not have been there. While I would also agree that too often the police arrive after the bank robbery is over to catch the BG in the act, having nothing in our schools but a telephone is not the right solution.

We seem to be able to have sophisticated fire alarms in the schools to contact fire departments and noone thinks anything about it. My home alarm system can send different signals including panic. My point is simply that someone threatening a school is real and that the more quickly that police can be notified, the more likely that it is that they will arrive in time to stop innocent bloodshed. And yes, I do acknowledge that with any alarm system comes the possibility of false alarms.

[texanjoker]

The most death threats I have ever received have come during the 4 years here in TX working child abuse cases where CPS case workers have taken children. Some of those people go nuts, as in this case with your family. I have seen entire CPS offices closed do to some of the threats. Some are perceived, but some are real as some of those parents were pretty bad.

A lot of the schools in Austin make you "buzz" in but they buzz anybody in

[Running Arrow Bill]

My daughter and the neighbor's little girl told me that Friday afternoon their school was on lockdown. I asked them what happened, they said they didn't know but the teachers were told to lock the door, turn out the lights, and get out of sight. Both of them said their teachers armed themselves with a big pair of scissors in their back pockets. Yeah you read that right, scissors. A woman who's kid had been taken by CPS was threatening to shoot up the school and the teachers grabbed scissors. The school is 2 miles from the police station, and yet the woman was able to get away before the cops could get there. I am so angry. I plan on going to the next school board meeting and also petitioning for armed security.


http://www.kxxv.com/story/23614477/moth ... Id=9381578" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Don't take scissors to a gun fight...

[bagman45]

I would certainly support an approach that relieved some LEO's from their duties driving around town writing tickets, to allow them to be placed in each school building during school hours.

[CEOofEVIL]

Perhaps I can shed some light on the topic of school security; I work IT in a small, rural school district (which I will not name for obvious reasons) and we've been making quite a few changes to accommodate for increased security and safety for the kids in the past few months.

Regarding the whole "Silent Alarm" idea - such a thing does exist. Our department has been working with a company called COPsync to integrate their product into our district technology plan for months now. The gist of their program is that each computer in a school (issued to Teaching or Administrative Staff) has a small unobtrusive program installed on it. This program basically runs in the task bar constantly, until needed. If a situation arises that requires immediate law enforcement presence, a user simply double clicks the icon, and an alert is sent out after a short delay (to make sure it is not actuated by accident). This alert is sent out to every Law Enforcement agency in our area - sheriffs department, local PD, DHS and all of it's alphabet cousins in an effort to get a better response, both in numbers of responding officers, and time.

So thankfully, the technology does exist, though not every ISD is going to implement it for whatever reason. I know that as far as how we have things setup, it's intended to provide another option to contact help as there are some plausible scenarios where a phone may not be a viable option to do so. I think this is a great idea personally, as I'm one of the few folks in the district that feels our security could use some massive bolstering. Thankfully we're headed in the correct direction. We do have a sheriff at each campus all the time to improve in response to a threat. Which is great...BUT, without getting into details, the entire district needs SERIOUS training regarding lockdown drills and emergency procedures for something like an active shooter scenario, the Sheriffs Dept included. We ran a drill some months back that had an abysmal outcome (in my view).I sincerely hope they've been training more - and likewise, the staff needs to be better trained, however the emphasis is simply not put on this need by our School Board or SI.

A close friend of mine who is a teacher has invited me to help create a presentation for the school board regarding our security protocols, and how despite the improvements we are making need to be much more far reaching with a lot more constant training. School Marhsalls, and allowing CHL on campus will be included by this. We really strongly believe that things as they are now, are no where near where they should be. I've even suggested that we have a small number of selected staff attend a course such as ICE/Rob Pincus' SARC to our SI, however he simply seems to have dismissed it for whatever reason. Hopefully as time develops, we can help initiate better training and protocols for all of our staff to help create the utmost secure environment without taking extremely impractical measures.

So, as far as I can tell, school security can always be improved. Ours wasn't great but is getting better - and still needs a ton of work to meet what I feel are acceptable standards. Technology can really help deliver the extra edge to help things become safer, if you can swing it. Since I only have experience with my area, I'd be interested to see and hear about how security is for a large ISD - I'd imagine it'd be a far cry from how it is for us.