From the Desk of the Superintendent -- Thoughts on the Sandy Creek Shooting

by Mike Rennells

Worth County R-III Superintendent 

Last Friday, as I was watching the news about Sandy Creek Elementary, I am sure that the same emotions were rushing through me that many of you were experiencing.  Anger, disbelief, sadness, and almost a feeling of hopelessness struck me throughout the weekend.  After looking at Newtown, Connecticut more closely, I was further taken back by how similar this community is to Worth County.  Both communities have a population of around 2000 people and both have a large group of their population that has lived there, their entire lives.  After discovering this, the event became even more difficult to distance myself from.  Though it is hard for us that live in rural Missouri to believe, if it can happen there, it can happen here. 

A few years ago, I had an opportunity to go to a couple of different events that really changed my perspective on school violence prevention and preparedness.  Since then, I have always believed that every school, large and small, should have systems and training in place to prevent events like this from happening.  However, after we have seen Friday’s events unfold, I believe that it is evident that we cannot prevent every event from happening.  In fact, we owe it to all of our kids to make sure that we are prepared if something awful like this happens at Worth County R-III. Therefore, I wanted to take a minute of your time, so you know what we are doing here at the school.

First of all, like a good coach or teacher, I firmly believe that practice makes perfect.  Not only do our students need to practice drills, our faculty, staff, and administration need to do the same.  One thing that I have always heard from different military personnel is that in times of chaos, people will revert back to their training.  Knowing this, we need to make sure our people know what to do.  One drill that we already had planned was an evacuation drill.  This is where we take everyone out of the building, to a secondary location. If you watched the news this weekend, you would have seen that the secondary location for Sandy Creek was their local fire station.  This is where parents were told to pick up their kids immediately after the incident. 

This year we have also purchased a parent/student notification system.  In the event of an emergency, we now have the capabilities to send all parents/guardians a recorded message.  This recorded message will be a voice of a school administrator letting everyone know what has happened and where exactly you can pick your child up.  Unlike “textcaster,” which is a very good system, our new system can call landlines, cell phones, text, and send emails with no limitation on the amount of information we want to send.  If we do have a snow day this winter, we will hopefully be able to use this system so that we are prepared in case of a real emergency.   

On Monday morning, my first call was to a company that I encountered a few years ago.  This company is called Strategos International and works with several different entities, but what I was interested in is their active shooter training for schools.  This organization will come in and work with our entire faculty and staff for an entire day on several issues related to active shooters in school buildings.  At my previous school district, I had the opportunity to bring this group in and I have never sat through a more powerful professional development opportunity.  This group will train our teachers on what to do with your kids in case of a live fire, intruder, or any other potential violent situation that could happen at schools.  We have also invited our local law enforcement to sit through this training as well.  The group will actually send someone here to work specifically with our local law enforcement on what to look for, respond and act when entering a building that have had a violent situation occur.  This part of the training is very important.  I know I heard from several different journalists on the news this weekend, that more young people would have died if the first responders did not get in the school and respond in the quick manner that they did.      

Not only have we focused on preparedness, but prevention is something that should be on the forefront of our minds.  We do require all visitors to sign-in, when entering our building, but as we have seen that is not going to always stop someone that is intent on committing a violent act.  As educators the most important thing we can do is build strong relations with all of our young people.  Obviously, we will find out in the weeks to come about Sandy Creek, but in nearly every other school shooting situation, the assailant told someone else what he was planning on doing.  Even though it doesn’t always make the national news, several shootings and other violent acts have been prevented, because a student or adult has told the local authorities about what they were hearing. 

This is where, as a community working together, we can hopefully prevent a situation from occurring here.  If you suspect, hear something or your child tells you something that they have heard, please report it to the authorities immediately.  Authorities should include the local sheriff’s office and/or the school’s administration.  Also, please speak with your children and grandchildren on why it is so important to report, if they hear someone talking about a possible violent act. 

Finally, something that is on the Worth County R-III Board of Education’s long-term facility goals is to put an electronic door access on all exterior doors.  This will prevent anyone from entering the building unless they have an electronic key.   The system that we have looked at does have disposable keys so that if a community group needed to use the gym, they could get a key card from the school that would get them in at a specific time and location.  Another reason we feel why this is so important is because over the years the school has had many keys go out, copies made, and not all have been returned.  Again, I know that this would be inconvenient; however, if we can prevent something from happening to our most important asset, I believe it is well worth it.

I very well might have left some things out; however like many of you, I am saddened by the events that happened, and want to make sure this is something that our school community does not have to go through.  I cannot imagine how the parents, children and community are feeling right now.  Personally, I struggled to speak with my own children about this so that they could make sense of this.  Anytime a life is taken, especially a young person, it is a tragic event.  What we must do is learn any lessons that can come out of this and do all that we can to protect our young people. 

My thoughts and prayers are with the entire Sandy Creek Elementary community.