‘No School District is Immune’

April 26, 2023 by Brian Doering

Following a recent shooting scare at West Geauga High School — and ensuing pressure from parents for stronger safety measures in the district — officials dove deeper into the actions they’re taking to meet those demands April 24.

West Geauga Schools Superintendent Richard Markwardt, Tim DelVecchio, security advisor for the Ohio Schools Council, Chester Township Police Department Chief Craig Young, Capt. Jeff Sherwood and Russell Township Police Department Sgt. Vince Valerio attended the West Geauga Schools Board of Education meeting Monday to talk about safety initiatives being put in place now and plans for the future.

“We always had it and I think it’s even more underscored now,” Markwardt said. “There is no school district anywhere that is immune to the threat of harm and it doesn’t have to come from an outside entity. Sometimes, it comes from somebody that’s within the school. You have my commitment and the board knows I’ve always felt that safety was important. The events of April 3 showed me just how close to home something like could strike and really underscored our need to move quickly to implement these plans. We don’t have time to really contemplate them too much longer. We need to have them in place.”

Markwardt said the district has always focused on safety and had a plan in place to deal with calamities and/or near calamities.

“This is a process that is ongoing and has been ongoing for many years,” he said.

DelVecchio, who works for Ohio Homeland Security to help schools develop their emergency operations plan, said West Geauga Schools is in what he calls his “platinum club.”

“This is where I come to get good ideas to share with other schools,” DelVecchio said. “Every school in Ohio has to have an emergency operations plan and the requirements are quite extensive. These plans are not only repeated by homeland security to see if they meet all the state requirements, but they’re also reviewed by local law enforcement, local fire services and the county emergency management agency.”

The state usually gives school districts a six-month warning that their time is coming up for another submission, DelVecchio said.

“They give them six months because it takes that long to put a good plan together. This is not an easy job and it requires work on a lot of people to make a viable and workable plan. Of course, part of that plan is addressing an active shooter situation,” he said, adding an emergency management test must also be conducted every year.

“This is a report that we have to file with the state and they look at it to see if we’re doing things properly if it’s a test that is actually meaningful. One of the more important things that we have to do is what they call a full scale of emergency management test and this is a test that involves your local first responders,” he said.

The test can involve situations such as an active shooter response, a hazardous spill where fire services become involved and a tornado situation, which would involve the Emergency Management Agency, he said.

“One of the things that we’ve done recently is behavioral threat assessment training. We often talk about what we had in Nashville or somebody from the outside world decides they’re going to come in and create violence in a school. That’s why we have all these security features,” DelVecchio said. “But, how about the child that is within the school that has issues that’s frustrated and is prepared to do something bad?”

DelVecchio said staff and administrators are trained to pick up on warning signs and address the situation during its early stages.

“In other words, we come up with an intervention to prevent the attack from happening. Your district here was one of the early ones that got across the finish line with this. You have highly trained staff, you have behavioral assessment teams in each one of your schools here,” DelVecchio said. “That’s to the district’s credit because a lot of schools are only required to do it in their middle school and high school. Here we have it in all of their schools.”

Markwardt said the school district has spent in excess of $1 million over the last several years on security enhancements.

“We have secured hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of grant funding. But as I say, that’s just a portion of what we’ve actually spent in the district for some of the security measures,” Markwardt said, adding the district has a number of mental health resources that are available.

“There are counselors in the school, there’s a school social worker,” Markwardt said. “Others are ones that we go to outside agencies to avail ourselves of their services. Ravenwood would be an example. The Geauga Crisis Team — when they come in to provide services for our students — would be another example.”

The superintendent said having a school resource was vital to averting a shooting April 3.

“We’d like to see that expand in the years ahead, but right now, we have a school resource officer whose station is primarily at the high school and he’s there during the school year,” Markwardt said. “We’re thinking that may need to be enhanced for next year.”

Markwardt said expanding the SRO has been a conversation for the entire school year and not just as a result of April 3.

“We have someone nine months out of the year. We feel like we need someone 12 months out of the year,” Markwardt said. “We also feel that we need increased police security at the school buildings. This is not at all to minimize the presence we already have, but we feel that we should have, if at all possible next year, security in our buildings when our buildings are open. That’s every building that we’re looking at having a police presence in those buildings during the hours of operation of our schools.”

Young said being passionate about school safety from a police department perspective is a complete understatement.

“School safety is so important to us because we understand what our schools are. It’s the most vulnerable part of a community. We take it seriously,” he said. “We’re passionate about it, but beyond that, having the relationship that we have with our schools is unlike anything I’ve probably ever seen in my years of law enforcement.”

Young said he, Markwardt and Sherwood began brainstorming on ways to better school safety near the end of 2022.

“To see the passion that he had for school safety really drove me and then we just started a brainstorming project,” Young said of Markwardt. “Captain Sherwood and I really just started coming up with ideas. We really started looking at what other districts were doing and what was effective. We just started coming up with plans and bouncing them off of one another. When we brought this to the school, I can’t say how impressed I was with really how they just looked at us and said how do we get this done? How do we get this accomplished?”

Young emphasized he was not saying everything the department did was perfect.

“One thing that we learned from this is that it’s real. It can happen anywhere and what can we do to make it better?” Young said. “We’re taking it seriously and I want to ensure everybody that’s here how serious we are taking this.”

Markwardt said the school district also needs more active training for staff members.

“We feel that we need more professional development focus on that type of security in our buildings,” he said, adding there is a memorandum of understanding with the Chester Township Police Department and another with the Russell Township Police Department that is in the hands of the attorneys representing those organizations, as well as West Geauga Schools.

“What we’re trying to do is iron out the wrinkles in that and develop a consistency so that we can have these organizations all enter into a contract, a memorandum of understanding that will give us some of the things we’d like to attain,” Markwardt said. “We’ll continue to pursue safety grants. We have one in the works right now that we’re trying to obtain. Hopefully, we’ll be successful with that, but it’s a sizable grant. Some of these grants are $50,000 per building, so you can see it’s a significant amount.”

Markwardt said the school wants to have a trained Alert Lockdown Inform Counter Evacuate-certified individual on staff with the hope of it being the SRO stationed at the high school.

“The person who we believe will have that role is in the process right now of obtaining that training over the summer months,” Markwardt said. “We also want to have the safety-related staff exercises of professional development in place by this summer. Those are the things that we’d like to have in place for fall so that we can see a notable difference in the way we address safety in our schools.”

In other business, school board members passed a resolution recognizing senior Casey Orloski for reporting to the SRO he found a bullet in the bathroom, which led to Morrissette’s arrest and thwarted plans for a shooting.

“They have a student that went to our school resource officer and reported something he saw. That is what we want to see in law enforcement,” Young said. “That’s what this is all about. Building those relationships to where students feel comfortable with law enforcement. They feel comfortable reporting things and then we can take over and we can do the things that we know we need to get done with law enforcement.”