Month: February 2013

Albemarle County School District Assistant Superintendent Matt Haas remembers the day Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and themselves at Colorado’s Columbine High School in 1999 as a day he knew his job would no longer be the same. A climate of fear was born overnight at the Virginia Beach high school where he was then assistant principal.

“I never thought I would hear a parent say on the phone, ‘I don’t want to send my child to school, because I’m worried that they won’t come home,’” he said.

That fear has spiked everywhere in the wake of subsequent acts of violence at schools across the nation, and has surged again since the shooting that left 26 children and staff dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut two months ago this week. It’s manifested locally in a gun attack rumor at Albemarle High School that led some parents to keep their kids home one December Friday, and an angry reaction from parents over a pellet gun shooting on a Charlottesville school bus last month. Now, police and administrators are planning a forum to help tamp down the community’s hair-trigger emotions over school violence, even as they get familiar with an initial set of recommendations from a special school safety task force convened by Governor Bob McDonnell.

Haas said local schools are actually ahead of the curve when it comes to several of the new recommendations, including the implementation of safety audits and checklists. Sometimes the problems come down to details of design, he said.

“When most of our schools were built in the 1960s and ’70s, they were built to prioritize getting everyone out if there was a fire,” said Haas. That means doors everywhere, which now leaves buildings vulnerable to a very different kind of threat. The solution has been to monitor entrances carefully, and introduce strict rules about visitor check-ins.

Jim Henderson, assistant superintendent for administration services for Charlottesville City Schools, said his district partners with police on a security overhaul every other year, and has recently put more focus on how to control visitor traffic.

“We want to be able to be more cognizant of who comes and who leaves,” he said.

Local attitudes toward upping the number of armed guards at schools—a topic the task force is set to take on in the coming months—are more mixed.

There are currently eight Special Resource Officers (SROs) working at city and county schools, each a trained cop with a loaded weapon on his or her hip. Albemarle’s three main high schools each have one, as does Murray, a public charter school. Charlottesville High School has two. Buford Middle School has one, and so does Walker Upper Elementary.

Those numbers are down from their peak in 2006, said Albemarle County Police Chief Steve Sellers, when the county alone had seven or eight officers assigned to its schools. The reason there are fewer SROs now is the same reason Sellers questions the wisdom of some Virginia lawmakers’ insistence that every school in the state now needs one: They’re expensive, and strained school and municipal budgets don’t have room for many more of them.

“I just don’t think it’s the answer,” Sellers said. “I would love to have 25 more officers for my police department, but it’s not just 25 more police officers. It’s five or six supervisors to support that. It’s administrative costs associated with that. And I don’t think it’s sustainable.”

School officials said when you steer more money to costly protective measures, you also risk upending the atmosphere of warmth and welcome a school is supposed to provide, and obscuring a fact often lost in escalating fears over headline-grabbing shootings: Since the 1990s, overall school violence has plunged.

Nobody pushes that last point harder than Dewey Cornell, a UVA psychologist and nationally known expert on youth violence who was one of the 45 people tapped to serve on the governor’s school safety task force. He’s often called to testify on behalf of juveniles convicted of murder, and has been privy to the intimate details of the kinds of crimes that become TV news specials—several involving teenagers who shot classmates, parents, and teachers. But he’s also spent more than three decades watching trends in school violence, and said such high-profile incidents are still the exception, not the rule.

“The level of violence in schools has declined steadily and dramatically since the early ’90s,” Cornell said. “It’s about a third what it was then.”

That’s because starting about 20 years ago, schools took action to tackle violent behavior within student populations, with counseling programs for anger, peer conflict, and learning problems that lead to student frustration.

“There are hundreds of controlled studies looking at the effects of these school-based mental health programs,” said Cornell. “And they show that they work.”

But in the wake of a tragedy like Newtown and the massive amount of press coverage that follows, it’s all too easy to forget data, and to turn the focus on the stranger with a gun.

“Every time we have a really high-profile school shooting, there’s a spike in fear, and a rush to impose policies and crack down,” he said, some of which do more harm than good. “We’ve spent quite a bit of money on physical security and crisis response approaches, I think based largely on fear of having a local school shooting—a shooting here—and we haven’t paid as much attention to the prevention efforts that have to start long before.”

Jim Henderson said that since Newtown, it’s hard to get away from the issue, as worried parents turn even school budget meetings into Q&As on safety measures. And with emotions running high, there’s more scrutiny when things get out of hand. Last month, administrators waited a day to alert parents that an elementary school student had shot a classmate with a pellet gun on a city school bus, prompting a furious reaction, which included a rant on the evening news from the parents of the child shot.

Henderson said discipline issues have to stay confidential, but he understands parents’ frustration and the need to restore their faith in schools’ ability to protect students. That’s the impetus behind a joint forum on school safety organized by both districts and set for 6:30pm February 21 at the County Office Building. Schools will never be impenetrable to violence, Henderson said, but the community has to trust that officials are doing what they can to protect those in them.

“If we put buzzers at all the doors and bars over the windows, we still couldn’t solve the issue, and we can’t control every moment,” he said. “No matter what we do, I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that this will never happen again. What I can tell you is that I know the schools are safe.”

Each week, the news team takes a look at upcoming meetings and events in Charlottesville and Albemarle we think you should know about. Consider it a look into our datebook, and be sure to share newsworthy happenings in the comments section.

• On Tuesday, February 12, The City of Charlottesville is hosting a lecture by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities fellow Monika Siebert on the reasons behind the public’s mixed reaction to the long-awaited National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), which opened on the Mall in Washington, D.C. in 2004. The lecture, which runs from noon to 1pm, is one of a series of monthly presentations by VFH fellows held in City Council chambers. For more information, contact Ann White Spencer, aspencer@virginia.edu.

• The Charlottesville Planning Commission holds its next regular meeting at 5:30 pm Tuesday in City Council Chambers. On the agenda is a public hearing on a special use permit for a 29-unit housing development on Stonehenge Avenue, as well as an application for a permit to allow a 4,000-square-foot lab at the old Martha Jefferson Hospital site from recently announced tenant HemoShear.

• The city is holding a public meeting on the Belmont Bridge Replacement project at 6pm Wednesday, February 13 at the Central Library’s McIntire Rom. Members of the community are invited to attend and offer comments on the plan. Check out www.belmontbridge.com for more details.

 

It’s been a whirlwind of a week in the Virginia legislature, with the unexpected death of the controversial redistricting bill amended by the Senate last month and the banning of drones from the state for two years (our own Charlottesville led the way on this initiative, becoming the first American city to pass a two-year moratorium on drone activity). Here’s some more buzz coming out of Richmond this week:

Virginia’s redistricting mayhem

After much to-do about Virginia Senate Republicans’ sly redistricting move during Obama’s inauguration, the bill came to rest Wednesday when House Speaker William Howell, R-Stafford, chose to kill it before allowing it to come back to the House floor. Look no further than here, here, and here to track the now-dead redistricting plan and what its implications would have been for Charlottesville.

According to the Washington Post, Howell might face pushback from angry Republicans who may refuse to vote for his transportation and other future legislation. 

Voter ID laws

Voter fraud and voter ID have been hot topics this week. Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling supported Democratic efforts to amend voter ID laws by casting the tie-breaking vote to push back the enactment of strict voter ID laws to 2014, ostensibly to allow for more time for the public to be educated about new requirements. Wednesday, HB 1337 passed in the VA House, eliminating several forms of identification that Virginia voters can use at the polls including “a copy of a current utility bill, bank statement, government check, or paycheck that shows the name and address of the voter and a voter’s social security card.” The vote is pending approval based on the cost of providing registered voters with photos if they do not already have a photo ID, according to the Times Dispatch. 

The House also passed three voter fraud bills sponsored by our very own Rob Bell, R-Albemarle County, according to a press release from Bell. One bill, HB 1765, requires that state police help weed out felons who are registering to vote and help the State Board of Election “identify felons that are already on the voter rolls.” His other bill, HB 1764, requires Virginia to collaborate with other states to fight against voter fraud by making sure that no one is registered in multiple states at once.

A third allows Virginia’s Attorney General to bypass the Virginia Board of Elections, local elections board, or local prosecutors by prosecuting election law violations independently—worth noting, considering he’s running for that very office.

McDonnell’s education plan

On Monday, the House of Delegates passed one of McDonnell’s more controversial education proposals, according to the Times Dispatch. The bill would implement a system of grading for our schools based on an A-through-F grading system. Failing schools would be put under the charge of the Opportunity Education Institute, a statewide school division created by the bill.

Under the plan, after schools are able to reach full accreditation, they can be handed back to their local board, but ultimately, the statewide school division makes that decision. The division would be given autonomy in deciding “what to do with the schools, including turning them into charter schools,” says the Times.

Drone patrol

Virginia could soon follow Charlottesville’s lead and be the first state to pass legislation in favor of drone regulation. The bill easily passed through the House and then the Senate Monday and Tuesday with votes of 83-16 and 36-2 respectively. Ah, bipartisanship!

According to U.S News, the bill puts a 2-year moratorium on state and local drone use except during special circumstances such as “In cases where there is a ‘major disaster’ or Amber Alert, a search and rescue operation using police drones may be used when ‘necessary to protect life, health, or property,’” says the U.S. News article.

Despite the bill’s easy passage in the legislature, Governor McDonnell spoke months ago in support of drones and may choose not to pass the bill. 
Drug testing dead in the water

A bill that would require drug testing of some Virginia welfare recipients failed in the Senate 20-19 on Monday. The bill would have required welfare applicants to go through a drug screening process, and, if they tested positive, to seek treatment or lose benefits for a year, according to an Associated Press story picked up by the Washington Post.