PART TWO IN A CONTINUING SERIES ON THE IMPACT OF GUNS
Illustration by Chris Visions
Chesterfield County resident Dot Heffron was heartbroken to hear her first grader tell her that his school held an active shooter drill — not because she didn’t want her son to be prepared, but because of the realities that students have to face.
“Fortunately, they were in a place where the teachers said, ‘Let’s pretend there’s a skunk in the hallway,’ so it was treated very gently with the children, but as a parent, I knew what was happening,” she says.
Those kinds of drills, called lockdowns, are required under state law to be conducted four times a year in each school district. Heffron, a former teacher and one of five new members of the Chesterfield School Board, is among the leaders in Richmond-area public school systems who are working to stay ahead of evolving security threats.
Recent steps taken by Chesterfield, Henrico County and Richmond school officials include improved threat assessment practices, rolling out smartphone apps to report emergencies and investing in everyday safety measures such as surveillance cameras and door locks.
Despite the increased focus on security, administrators at the three districts agree that it’s important for students not to feel overly policed.
“You could make these schools fortresses, but that’s not fun for students to attend school in a fortress because it’s not a prison, so you have to find a balance between safe structures and comfortable structures,” says Christine Bailor, emergency coordinator for Henrico County Public Schools.
Bailor says that the school system recently revamped its threat assessment protocol by shifting its focus away from punishing students and toward prevention and intervention through mental health counseling and other resources.
“We do everything at the school level to provide the interventions for the student when they’re in the school, but where are they when they’re not in school? They’re in the community, so [we’re] providing those same interventions, or interventions that are more beneficial when they’re at home,” says Cortney Berry, Henrico’s school safety coordinator and Bailor’s second in command.
In Richmond, the School Board has focused on enhancing security measures by spending more than $1 million in 2018 to install surveillance cameras and locks in schools, 4th District board member Jonathan Young says. While he thinks that the improvements are a good start, Young says the district has a long way to go to improve disciplinary measures for its students.
Chesterfield County authorities conduct a summertime simulation of an active shooter scenario. (Photo by Ash Daniel)
“If you want me to be blunt about it, Richmond Public Schools tolerates behavior that no other jurisdiction … in the region will tolerate, and because of that, it puts our students and our teachers in jeopardy,” he says. “The reality is that we are allowing a very small group of students to define the culture in almost all of our buildings.”
Racial disparities in student discipline also have been documented in Richmond and other area school systems, with black students suspended at about four times the rate of white students, according to a Virginia Commonwealth University study published in 2019.
An increased focus on safety was sparked in Chesterfield by the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead. In response, the county convened a School Safety Task Force headed by Brian Moran, Virginia Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security, and by former Virginia Secretary of Education Laura Fornash. The group evaluated protocols at county schools and recommended ways to strengthen safety for its students.
One of the panel’s key recommendations for the school system was to purchase an app or alert system to notify administrators, police and first responders in the case of an emergency. That recommendation was realized in December, when the school system announced it would roll out a smartphone app called Rave. The app connects staff members to E-911 centers in the case of an emergency, fire or active threat, according to a county news release.
“It feels very big and unmanageable and scary, but I think that there’s steps that we can take, and this is a step in the right direction for sure,” Heffron says.
In April 2018, Richmond-area students gathered on the anniversary of the mass shooting at Columbine High School to march to the Virginia State Capitol and demand action on gun violence as part of the Virginia National School Walkout Protest. (Photo by Adam DuBrueler)
Henrico and Chesterfield public schools also work with their local police departments to take their preparedness a step further by staging simulated active shooter events. For the past three years, Chesterfield County Public Schools has worked with police, fire and rescue, and the county’s emergency management office to hold simulations of active shooter scenarios at schools during summer break, says Maj. Brad Badgerow of the Chesterfield Police Department.
“We don’t go in with live ammo or anything like that, but we go in with equipment to simulate exactly what we’re looking to do,” he says, responding to questions about a 2018 drill at O.B. Gates Elementary School.
Richmond Police Department spokeswoman Chelsea Rarrick says the department does not conduct that kind of training in city schools. RPS administrators focused on safety and security were not available for comment by press time.
“It really is the most important responsibility as public servants that we have,” School Board member Young says. “As important as it is for the buses to run on time, or for our transcripts to be right, or for the buildings to be warm in the winter, we have no greater responsibility than to protect our children and our teachers.”
