Opinions are rampant in the area about how schools, and communities in general, should handle security.
Some agree that having armed sheriff’s deputies in all schools is the best solution. Others argue it’s more financially prudent to hire private security firms or retired law enforcement and military personnel to handle the job. A few have even suggested that beefing up existing security measures such as video surveillance and fencing will solve the problem.
What is clear, though, is that no one is content with the status quo. Something must change and it must change before a tragedy like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School occurs.
“If you’d asked me before Sandy Hook if we were going to have a (school resource officer), I’d have said, ‘No, we don’t need one,’ ” said Terri Roberts, who oversees several charter schools in the area. “(But) we’re living in a different world.”
She said they’ve learned that the nation’s youngest students aren’t immune to violence.
Elementary students can be touched. They have been touched.
Reacting to tragedy
In the hours following the deadly shooting in Newtown, Conn., educators across the country took a collective breath and then pulled out their own crisis plans.
“I think Connecticut was a wake-up call,” said Okaloosa County Superintendent of Schools Mary Beth Jackson. “I think it said, ‘OK, everybody, you’ve just breezed along the last years,’ and it’s almost like someone crossed the line and now there will be others out there.”
Swift, immediate action was demanded. Parents and communities wanted to know how local school officials would prevent anything like the Sandy Hook shooting from happening locally.
Small steps were taken on the day 20 children and six adults lost their lives there. Principals found ways to improve their school’s crisis plan. Front office staffers were put on high alert for any visitors. Doors were locked.
Parents in Okaloosa County were told they could pick up their children early from school if it would help ease fears.
“I think everybody knew at that point that nothing was the same,” said Roberts, who oversees schools such as Liza Jackson Preparatory and Okaloosa Academy for the Rader Group.
By the following Monday, the sheriffs in Okaloosa and Walton counties had decided to place deputies in all schools, even at the cost of other units within their agencies. Other schools arranged to have law officers to be near or on school campuses whenever they could.
For some, the new precautions soothed concerns, but for others it raised them. How far was too far in terms of school security, they asked.
Protecting the children
More than a month after the shootings, it’s no longer the topic of every discussion, but the sense of urgency to improve school security hasn’t faded.
In Walton and Santa Rosa counties, task forces have been forged between school officials, law enforcement and county government representatives to try to identify solutions.
“This is not a school issue,” said Santa Rosa County Superintendent Tim Wyrosdick. “This is a community issue.”
Wyrosdick said they’ve identified three priorities in his county.
First, they want to make all public facilities, including schools, more secure. They will look at the layout of buildings and scrutinize check-in and check-out procedures.
Next, they will take a hard look at what can be done in the community and schools to understand mental illness better.
The third step, ideally, would be to put resource officers in all the schools, but that depends on funding from state and federal governments, Wyrosdick.
“This is an issue that I believe Tallahassee needs to address whole-heartedly,” Wyrosdick said. “It’s not going away.”
If recent appeals to Florida lawmakers are any indication, superintendents across the state appear to share Wyrosdick’s opinion.
Educators met with lawmakers last week to discuss funding and its importance to school safety.
Right now, school districts get money from the Safe Schools fund for security measures, including school resource officers. However, that has been cut by 15 percent over the last five years.
School districts also have made cuts. In Okaloosa County, for example, School Board members have voted more than once to not place resource officers in all the middle and high schools because of the expense.
To help pay for the resource officers now in all schools in the district, the board dipped into a reserve fund set aside for emergencies. The only school without a county-placed officer is Eglin Elementary School, but security police on Eglin Air Force Base are working with the school.
“I know in order to continue doing this we have to cut something out and I’m willing to do that,” Jackson said. “Because to me … there isn’t a higher priority than the safety of children.”
Counting on students and staff
Security always has weighed heavily on Michael Mosley, superintendent of Rocky Bayou Christian School in Niceville.
With a sprawling 25-acre open campus, it’s impossible to know about every person who enters the property. Right now, Mosley estimates about 85 percent of the visitors actually obey signs asking them to check in at the front office.
Short of installing an entry gate, the school depends on a crisis plan, the staff and the students to prevent or deal with issues.
“In a perfect world I’d like to have a deputy on campus,” Mosley said. “Realistically, bad guys with guns only get defeated by good guys with guns.”
Currently, that’s not an option. The price tag is too high and the size of the campus always would be a challenge.
However, that doesn’t mean the school is doing nothing, he said.
All classrooms have two exits, and exterior doors are always locked. Visitors to the kindergarten area have to be buzzed in.
Mosley said Rocky Bayou’s crisis plan has been reviewed three times and is practiced a couple of times a year.
“I don’t think the danger is ever going to get less,” he said. “And I think most school administrators are going to err on the side of caution.”
At Seaside Neighborhood School in South Walton County, school administrators talked to adults and students.
“I went and talked to small groups of students and just reminded them what we could do,” Principal Kim Mixson said. “I think it’s important that they felt that they have some kind of power and input.”
Administrators at other private schools said they are taking similar approaches, and emphasized that everyone is on high alert even as they realize their plans are not perfect.
“There are just some things that you realize you’re at the mercy of God that it doesn’t happen to you,” Mosley said.
‘We deal with unhappy people’
Okaloosa County Sheriff Larry Ashley has made no secret that security policies at schools are full of holes.
He also hasn’t hesitated to make his case for school resource officers. He’s appeared before the County Commission once and the School Board twice.
To him, placing deputies at each school rather than relying on them to visit schools when they can is the cornerstone to improving security.
“If you’re not at the school when it happens, you’re reacting from the outside,” he said. “You’re not reacting from the inside, and you’re certainly not preventing from the inside.”
Right now, most school officials and many parents seem inclined to agree.
“In any school, on any given day, we deal with unhappy people,” Jackson said. “It isn’t just about protecting from an intruder.
“Our society has changed so much that people think anger and violence are the only way to handle things.”
Deputies have helped diffuse a number of situations in the short time they have been in all the schools, Ashley said.
They’ve caught a father who had a domestic violence injunction that prevented him from seeing his family who was trying to pick up his child. They’ve also dealt with bullying issues, a 7-year-old who was stabbing himself and a 12-year-old with a suicide note.
“It wasn’t in our mindset, I don’t think, until Connecticut, that we thought there was a possibility that there were those out there who would harm (children),” Ashley said. “ … When you start walking over 20 dead babies, it makes you think.”
Looming questions
What happens next year and the year after that and five years down the road are questions that few have found answers to yet.
“It’s not as easy as locking all the doors and not allowing somebody in,” said Jim Hicks, who is heading a task force in Walton County to improve school safety. “We don’t want our schools to be a prison and we don’t want our schools to be wide open. We’ve got to find that happy medium.”
In Walton County, officials barely have turned their attention from immediate issues to “intermediate” ones, according to Hicks, who is the transportation coordinator for the school district.
It will be a bit longer before they have the long-term picture figured out, he said.
“Some folks want us to have a knee-jerk reaction, but we’re resisting,” Hicks said. “We communicate with other districts daily just about, ‘What are you doing in this situation?’ ”
Okaloosa and Santa Rosa county officials said they are asking the same kinds of questions.
Will more guidance counselors or school resource officers improve safety? Will metal detectors become necessary? Would school uniforms help? Those types of issues, they say, are where the next true battle lies.
Everyone can agree changes are necessary, but it will take time to weigh the costs against the value of a life. And it will take years to determine the most effective approaches.
Ultimately, when all is said and done, not everyone will be satisfied and the result likely won’t be foolproof.
Tragedy, history has shown, has a way of coming back around. All people can do is prepare, and then hope and pray they’ve done enough.
Daily News Staff Writer Kari C. Barlow and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Contact Daily News Staff Writer Katie Tammen at 850-315-4440 or ktammen@nwfdailynews.com. Follow her on Twitter @KatieTnwfdn.