It didn’t take long for Rob Cunningham to cut to the heart of the matter Tuesday afternoon in Charleston.
Forty-eight hours after a mass shooting last month at an elementary school in rural Texas that left 19 students and two teachers dead, Cunningham was tasked with a tall order from Gov. Jim Justice.
Cunningham is a former West Virginia state trooper and federal agent who now serves as deputy secretary of the state Department of Homeland Security.
His new assignment is to cast a keen eye on school safety here, with the purpose of crafting a Best Practices document in a post-Uvalde world.
While mentioning the need for more counselors and other mental health professionals in school districts and school buildings, Tuesday’s session on school safety before the House of Delegates tended to focus on fundamental logistics and what might happen, physically, should someone start shooting in the main hallway.
For example: What buildings outfitted with what security measures, for the students and others who report every morning.
The districts that have school resource officers — and the districts that don’t.
Or the schools with the spotty cell service (critical in an emergency), given their construction or surrounding terrain in a mostly rural state.
Talking it out (but not locking it down)
Cunningham’s appearance was prompted by the horror of events more than 1,400 miles away.
As a law enforcement professional who is also president of the Putnam County Board of Education, Cunningham said any school building, anywhere, has its own dance and dynamic.
And those two emotional particulars, he said, are unique to any other building, anywhere, that functions as a place where large groups congregate.
That young, impressionable students are involved, he said, only makes the above even more critical.
Which is where his summation arrived. It came when he referenced a maximum-security prison in Fayette County.
“We can’t fortify schools,” he said, “to the point where they look like Mt. Olive.”
What can be done, though, Cunningham told lawmakers, is in part, what’s already being done.
Just a newly honed version of it.
However, some of what safety officials want to do, or want to enhance, might not be as easy as it looks, in terms of the discourse of civil liberties.
Big Brother — big price tag
Cunningham’s idea for an app where students can anonymously report their classmates who might be acting in an out-of-character, disturbing matter, was apparently one of those Tuesday.
The deputy secretary’s brief outline prompted one lawmaker to worry about the Big Brother-implications of students ratting out students — and falsely so, sometimes.
A discussion of the physical properties of school safety was again a reminder of the economic fortunes of one West Virginia county opposed to another.
Not every building where learning happens in the state is outfitted with Safe School entrances — and their labyrinths of ballistic glass, buzzed-in intercom and video cameras, “mantrap” waiting areas and the like.
All 17 buildings in Monongalia County’s district are, but as David Roach, the executive director of the state School Building Authority, told the House, work needs done in several other locales.
Counting Mon, Roach said 346 of West Virginia’s 674 schools have the safety features.
They were either retro-fitted with them or built with them.
That leaves 328 other buildings across the state in need of the additions to make the SBA standard, Roach said, and that costs money, as the authority found after talking with architects across the board.
At an average cost of $500,000 an entrance, the collective price tag tops out a $164 million, the executive director said.
Just waiting …
Lawmakers didn’t take any action related to the above on Tuesday.
Cunningham, meanwhile, told the House to seek him out, with ideas, concerns and observations, even.
“We don’t need to make a knee-jerk reaction,” he said. “We need to evaluate, and make the best decision possible.”
There is a caveat, he said.
It comes with the heightened awareness of living in a lock-and-load, new reality of chambered rounds.
Rounds just waiting to be discharged at the next poor grade, prom date rejection, cafeteria taunt or other bullying episode.
“School safety isn’t the math teacher’s responsibility or the principal’s responsibility,” Cunningham said.
“It’s everyone’s responsibility.”
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