Safety is something on all parents minds and on the minds of our teachers and staff and we take the responsibility of providing a safe place for students to learn and for staff to work very seriously

I grew up in the Minetonka school district I've lived in the district my entire life and have three daughters that went through Minetonka schools and I spent about three decades in law enforcement before coming to the school district as security coordinator

Initially it was really just learning more about the district and what was already in place both from a security standpoint whether that be physical security or plans and preparedness and there's been a lot of great things that have been done within the district especially as it relates to our buildings to make them more safe and secure for everyone

We have regular meetings both formal and informal with law enforcement I was just meeting with the representative from Minetonka Police Department yesterday on an issue so certainly the relationship we have with the SRO but we have a very good relationship with all the law enforcement agencies that serve our school district

Every spring law enforcement does a regional response training to train their officers and their supervisors how to respond in the event of an active shooter situation we were the first school district to be invited to participate and attend that same training so myself Jackie and our director Health Services attended that all day training alongside law enforcement

When he talked about the reunification process we looked at several different groups landed on the I Love You Guys Foundation then really worked with them closely to determine what did we need because they had a lot of different approaches that they could take and we helped them craft that two-day training for 60 of our people

We have an emergency procedures manual it's not that we didn't have emergency procedures in the past but we really didn't have a comprehensive manual that everybody in every school every leader was going by and so to be able to pull that all together and make that people felt like there was always a plan

A secure situation might be a situation where there's something of a threatening nature outside the school district that could be some type of police action or something going on outside we actually just had a recent example at Minetonka high school where we went into a secure mode and this simply means that any staff or students that are outside the building would come inside the building we would make sure all those exterior doors are locked school and classes would go on as normal

A hold that's a situation that doesn't rise to let's say the level of a lockdown but that's a situation where there may be something taking place in the school say in a hallway we've had a couple scenarios like this where there've been a medical situation involving a student or staff member something that we need to bring in let's say First Responders to take care of a situation

Although parents tell us year-over-year that more than 95% of them say that they feel that their school that their child's in is safe they will also say you can't do enough with safety keep our schools safe do more with safety it's come up on staff surveys it came up on the facility study task force survey it's come up in community surveys and it's not because they don't feel our buildings are safe it's because you can't get too safe

There's also things like technology that can help us improve safety at our facilities whether that is physical structure security at our schools which is constantly involving or whether that's device that we can offer to whether that be staff members or cameras in our school district things that will help us provide an overall picture of what's happening within our school district

Training is not a one and done situation and as we all know the threat environment across our country changes quite rapidly so we will continue to offer training each and every year to our staff because we tend to do what we are trained to do and the last time to learn about how you should respond during an emergency is during that emergency