Anchorage leaders held a press conference at City Hall today (Friday) to discuss school safety after news of the school shooting in Connecticut.
Anchorage School District Superintendent Jim Browder says he's had a lot of inquires from parents about school safety since this morning's tragedy in Connecticut. And he says he wants people to know that every school in the district has an emergency plan that's required by state law. And that they practice them regularly.
"One of the things that our principals do is that they practice lock down drills and other type of drills to make sure that everybody in their individual schools practices emergency situations."
A statement from Browder appears on the ASD website. In the letter he says that the district places student and staff safety as a top priority. He also notes that the district partners with the Anchorage Police Department to have school resource officers in schools. There are 16 School Resource Officers stationed at Anchorage High Schools plus two supervisors not stationed at schools. Anchorage Police Chief Mark Mew says his department works closely with the district.
"Those plans cover 18-20 different scenarios including the kind of thing you saw today. The schools have School Resource Officers and we work diligently to keep ahead of indications of trouble in advance so that we can forstall tragedies when we can and to train and plan for responses."
Chief Mew addressed why the Anchorage School district does not have metal detectors or other screening systems at front doors of buildings.
"In order to make that work you have to basically redesign the entire building because these schools were build before these considerations were important to folks. And I don't know how many back doors they have but a high school might have 60 or 80 back doors so it doesn't do any good at all to have a very complex, slow, methodical screening process at the front door."
Mew worked as the districts Director of Security and emergency preparedness from 2003 to 2009, writing the district's emergency plans and developing the school officer resource program. And automated phone message reassuring parents about school safety is going out to households in the Anchorage School District tonight.