Martinsburg, the fast-growing town in West Virginia’s bustling Eastern Panhandle, is more urban these days than most communities across the Mountain State.
Suburban, anyway — given its official Washington, D.C., metro-area designation.
While it also has its share of crime, that’s relative, too.
However, an incident occurred there at Spring Mills High School on a May afternoon last year that had everyone talking — in light of the events that followed 24 hours later.
It wasn’t really an “incident.” It was just one of those things that happen.
A teacher was putting up balloons to celebrate the Class of 2022 — when two of the balloons popped. The sharp reports were mistaken for gunfire.
One student sprawled flat, and a handful of others pounded down hallways and crashed into classrooms to take cover.
The teacher yelled apologies as she quickly restored order. Nervous laughter followed, but it still took a while for pulse rates to settle back down.
That was on May 23, 2022.
The very next day, halfway across the country in a little town in Texas, an 18-year-old charged an elementary school, fatally shooting 19 students and two teachers — while wounding 17 others.
Eddie Campbell Jr., the superintendent of Monongalia County Schools and himself a former high school principal, made note of the flight-or-flee response in Martinsburg.
“This is just where we are right now,” he said.
Where he’ll be in coming days is in Charleston at the state School Building Authority, which doles out dollars for infrastructure projects across West Virginia’s 55 public school districts.
Mon is requesting $4.1 million from the SBA to install a Safe Schools entrance at the county Technical Education Center of Mississippi Street.
Over the years, the district has done that for its other buildings — making sure ballistics glass, man-trap doorways and buzzers are in place, said Amanda Washington, the executive director of facilities management for Mon Schools.
Morgantown High School students now also walk through weapons detectors on their way to class daily, and so do their counterparts at University High and Clay-Battelle.
Taking aim — for coexistence and solutions
A total 299 of the state’s 637 schools have yet to be outfitted with such entrances, according to the West Virginia School Safety and Security Report, released last week by the state Department of Education.
There are 318 buildings across West Virginia that have to be staffed by uniformed resource officers, who patrol hallways and campus grounds.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones wants to literally bankroll a measure for safety in school buildings across the Peach State.
Jones suggests paying teachers a $10,000-a-year stipend to carry guns in schools after training and certification, which he says would be a proactive way to prevent or quell shootings.
The Georgia Association of Teachers, though, is opposed to the idea — saying educators, even if they are checked out on weapons, aren’t professionals by any means and could only add to the tragedy of a worst-case scenario.
Legislation, not loaded magazines, is the more effective way to go, the teacher association said.
In West Virginia last week, safety activist Michele Gay, whose 7-year-old daughter was among those killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, said the same.
Gay is the executive director of Safe and Sound Schools, the nonprofit organization she founded with another Sandy Hook parent who lost a child that day.
She delivered keynote remarks at the 2023 West Virginia School Safety Conference in Charleston.
For her, as she told MetroNews, it’s a matter of everyone talking — not just her.
That means teachers getting with law enforcement, cops conversing with school psychologists, social workers checking in with custodians and so on, she said.
Forget the ongoing debate, she said, of more school resource officers opposed to school counselors — and the other way around.
“What we’ve been saying all along is — ‘No, you need more of both.’”
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