PROTECTION: Present and future school systems are improving at Poly in order to lower fears of a threat to the students.
By Cameron Brewer, Staff Editor
One of the main priorities at a school, second only to education, is to guarantee student safety while on campus. With the increasingly devastating number of school shootings occurring across the country, preserving student safety is becoming more and more of a necessity. To guarantee student safety, measures are in place to ensure that the students will be well protected should any danger approach Poly. Assistant Principals Dr. Tacy Duncan and Mr. James Vaughan are leading the charge on this, promoting further developments within Poly.
In response to fears of an attack coming from within the campus, the school created an anonymous system that allows students to report if they witness or overhear violent or dangerous remarks. “Every single time there’s a conversation about violence, there is a really strict protocol we follow, and that’s helped a lot to just getting to know kids, why they’re saying that. So we have done a great job with our students reporting information to us, and we need to continue that, because the more students do that, the more we can offer students help so that it never gets to that,” Duncan detailed.
Certain measures are already implemented at Poly to protect against any external threats, such as an increased security presence, around Poly’ campus, with more oversight watching over the students, or a system of reporting possible dangers to the school if required. However, Vaughan and Duncan foresee even greater improvements to Poly’s safety measures. “We are going to be implementing the Safe Raptor system, which is going to start the end of September. Now, everyone is going to have to put an ID in this thing, and it shows us if they have anything on their record,” Duncan said. Eventually, the goal is to record everyone that walks on and off of campus, to ultimately discourage any violent elements from approaching Poly. “We are going to create badges for everybody that’s coming onto our campus, like you would see in hospitals,” Vaughan described. In this way, the assistant principals feel that the district will be better equipped to keep track of the comings and goings of visitors, thus preventing any potential dangers from even coming close to the students.