Something that’s sometimes hard to balance is the security of the facilities/safety of our staff and students with our procedures that allow open access to our community.
District residents and students may notice that we’re locking down our second and third floors after six o’clock each day. I realize this may inconvenience some of our students who forget a book and need to get into a locker late that evening or even our district residents who enjoy walking in our building. I’m sorry about that inconvenience. Our first floor is still open for walking and our students may have to plan ahead a bit more.
Anyone who’s been inside of our high school knows it’s a big building. We have limited custodial and cleaning staff in the evenings and recently have had some students in our building during a game who just had no good reason to be there. They weren’t Randolph students nor were they visiting to watch a neighboring school. Nor did they comply with any reasonable requests from adults.
That’s honestly more than our supervisors bargain for when they sign up to work at games, more than our cleaners and custodians should have to deal with while trying to clean our school, and not a risk I’m willing to take. With the second and third floors locked off, I know our cleaners are more secure in the building while working each evening and I’m more assured that no one is getting into our school with less than honorable intentions and going undetected for long.
I want to take precautions so that no one is seeing our school as a place to hide out, or wait in some quiet corner for the next day. If someone’s in the building for the wrong reasons, Deputy Grice is now authorized to press criminal trespassing charges. My first responsibility is the safety of our students and staff and that must outweigh the convenience of an open building to the few who need it and deter those who would abuse it.
Thanks to Dave Davison, Deputy Grice and Tim Bowley for walking the campus, forming a better plan and implementing it.
Is it a fail safe plan? Of course not. Is it a darn sight better than it was? Yep.