Tue, Oct 07, 2008
 Students enter Catalina Foothills High School's well-protected campus through a metal fence. The sign asks visitors to sign in at the school office.
photos by benjie sanders / Arizona Daily Star
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arizona daily star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 11.26.2006
Access to Marana Middle School begins at a small black box in the main office.
All visitors must feed their driver's license into the machine, where their name will be referenced against sex-offender databases in Arizona and other states. Anyone on the list is denied admission.
The school, at 11279 W. Grier Road, doesn't have a history of sex offenders sneaking onto the campus. It's just a pilot program instituted at the school to complement its existing system that lists who is allowed to pick up students, with a possible rollout across the remainder of the Marana Unified School District.
Across Tucson, other school districts are turning to cameras, former police officers and tall fences to keep campuses safer for students and teachers.
School officials, parents and students agree that schools need to be safer than they were 10 years ago, after events at Columbine High School and others across the country, and that some of the tried-and-true practices are in need of an upgrade.
Traditional schools are more secure than they were a decade ago, an Arizona Daily Star review found, but officials are using only minimum safety policies that remain largely inconsistent within many school districts. That could result in mixed signals and confusion if a response to a major event was needed.
Some schools are sealed tight during school hours. On other campuses, visitors can walk around for a long time before being spotted by a staff member. Some schools have the highest level of security technology, while others are relatively unguarded.
Local and state officials have worked together to put all schools on the same page by requiring that schools use a manual that spells out stricter minimum guidelines for lockdowns and evacuations. New schools could get improved safety specifications from state officials that don't require districts to pay from their own budgets to secure their property. But most importantly, everyone is putting a greater emphasis on the human eye as a safety factor.
Safety in the 21st century
Sixteen cameras watch over Catalina Foothills High School.
Whether it's the most secure campus in Pima County is debatable, but at the very least, it is one of the few schools using technology to monitor activity in all parts of campus.
Cameras have become the new trend in security in the past year, with nearly a dozen schools in four districts installing them, including Catalina Foothills High School, 4300 E. Sunrise Drive.
Vandalism and trespassing there have declined since cameras appeared late last year, assistant principal Laura Manning said. Quantifying how much crime has dropped is hard to do, but Manning is certain students have become more aware of the tighter security and are acting accordingly.
The Star reviewed the call records of six Tucson high schools — Catalina Foothills and Sunnyside high schools were the only campuses where police presence fell during the past five years. Catalina Foothills had 120 calls to police in the 2000-01 school year, but only 101 in the 2005-06 school year. The majority of those calls were either unfounded or were not of a severe nature.
A few incidents last year had a major impact on school safety procedures. Last September, students noticed a girl smoking heroin in a bathroom and reported it to security. Two other girls later were arrested and suspended, prompting district-wide discussion of spotting drug users on campus and random voluntary drug-testing.
Also, a call came into the school that a classroom was being held hostage, forcing the school to go into lockdown — locking classroom doors, turning off lights and crouching on the floor — until Pima County sheriff's deputies discovered it was a hoax.
Those incidents were not indicative of campus life, students say. They believe the school, with its locked iron gate at the entrance to the classroom part of the campus, is one of the safest in the Tucson area.
"It's been a safe environment for the past four years that I've been here," senior Codie Wintrode said. She said she hasn't thought about the cameras since they were installed.
But some school officials are hesitant to praise technology.
"The cameras can't be everywhere," said Alan Storm, Sunnyside Unified School District assistant superintendent. "It hasn't deterred things. Kids have found other ways to get in and do damage."
Many of the Sunnyside schools have cameras with blind spots, officials agree, but if a major emergency takes place at one of those schools, district officials can tap into the feed from any computer on the district server, or by using a password on an outside computer.
Cameras also are in use at schools in the Sahuarita and Vail school districts.
Tucson High Magnet School, the largest school in Tucson Unified School District at 400 N. Second Ave., now is reviewing proposals to install a camera security system. Aside from an alarm system, the school's current extent of safety technology is laptops within the two booths guarding the outlets of the school's parking lot.
That seems to guard against intruders, students say.
"I feel safe," freshman Annie Winters said. "Really, no one can get in because they check who's coming in. I've seen some people try to get in, but they're told to leave."
TUSD spokeswoman Chyrl Hill Lander said no district school has cameras, and there is no district support behind that initiative. If a school wanted to install cameras, Lander said the school would have to use money from its own budget to pay for them.
Building a better school
From the outside, the 21 schools in the Sunnyside Unified School District look impenetrable.
Wrought-iron fences have surrounded the perimeters of each school in the South Side district since 1992. In October of that year, a Desert View High School student was shot and killed in the school's parking lot when gang members drove into the lot after cruising the area at the end of the school day, according to Arizona Daily Star archives. The death prompted the district's governing board to mandate stricter security measures, including erecting fences and hiring more security guards.
By contrast, visitors can walk straight onto campus without having to check in at the main office at Flowing Wells Junior High School, 4545 N. La Cholla Blvd. While preparing a safety update for the district's governing board, Flowing Wells School District officials deemed the school the district's least safe.
In response, the district decided to add a gate and fence to funnel visitors into the main office. Construction is expected to begin soon, Superintendent Nic Clement said.
"Schools need to be accessible, but there needs to be a balance between who they want on campus and who they don't," he said.
Vail Unified School District won a $4.5 million grant to improve the safety of its schools through practical measures such as added fencing and security cameras on campuses.
The Arizona School Facilities Board, which hands out money to districts for new school construction and upgrades to existing schools, is preparing to discuss plans to put more emphasis on safety for new schools and put more state funding into security construction.
A study session during the board's Dec. 7 meeting will look at changes made at Columbine High School in the wake of the student shootings that killed 15, and other safety practices that could be used for new and existing schools, said Kristen Landry a Facilities Board spokeswoman.
Working together
Though school officials applaud the advances in technology and construction that have made schools safer, districts still had different minimum safety standards in place at their schools. This was most evident recently during the March walkouts for immigration protests, when some schools relied heavily on police to keep students in school while others almost literally came up with procedures on the spot as students made their way toward Downtown.
But that is changing this year.
For the first time, the Arizona Department of Education is requiring all districts to use the Arizona School Site Emergency Response Plan Template, a 79-page manual that provides districts with comprehensive guidelines to follow in case of fire, a bomb threat or act of nature. The manual was created years ago as a recommended reference, but officials saw that some schools were using bare-bones procedures.
The stronger requirement came from a desire to "facilitate cooperation and communication" between schools and outside agencies responding to emergencies, said Jean Ajaime, director of school safety and prevention in the Arizona Department of Education.
Lockdowns remain a major part of any emergency procedure, and after using the same procedure for decades, officials still say it's the best way to keep kids safe on campus, noting that survivors of recent school shootings were in locked classrooms, crouching on the floor. In Arizona, schools are now required to perform at least two lockdown drills a year and monthly evacuation drills.
"We run emergency drills … so our kids are prepared to act not out of fear, but out of practice," said Manning, Catalina Foothills High's assistant principal. "We could always second-guess ourselves, but that's the best response initially."
Lockdown procedures remain mostly unchanged in the manual, but comprehensive checklists for evacuations, bomb threats and fights are included. School and law-enforcement officials are required to sign the manual and review it annually.
Phil Brenfleck, whose son attends Palo Verde High Magnet School, in TUSD, doesn't think the staff there is fully capable of keeping tabs on all 1,508 students. He's aware, though, that district financial crunches make it impossible to hire more security.
"It's very difficult in today's environment to say you can watch what every student is doing," he said.
On StarNet: Find the online version of this story to participate in a school-safety poll at azstarnet.com/education
● Star reporter Kimberly Matas contributed to this story. ● Contact reporter Jeff Commings at 573-4191 or at jcommings@azstarnet.com.
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