Akron schools security chief Charles Rowles said his district of 25,000 students has had a disaster plan in place since the 1999 shootings in Columbine, Colorado. Akron's plan includes random drug, locker and book bag searches and security officers who get a daily list of the names of suspended students. Rowles says administrators and security officers also closely monitor students who have been involved with the juvenile court or children's services.
Charles Rowles: That person is interviewed by one of the persons in our departments to make a determination as to whether or not that student can be enrolled into the regular schools or into a alternative school.
The plan is working in Akron, which has about half of Cleveland's 52,000 students. Rowles says Akron had only one incident of a gun discovered on school property last school year. In Cleveland, juvenile court records indicate 112 incidents last year involving a deadly weapon on campus, a category that includes knives as well as guns.
Akron has one armed police officer and one or two unarmed security officers in each of its 15 high and middle schools. Akron school officers can call each other or the city police by radio immediately if they see or hear anything suspicious and they perform regular lock-down searches at the schools. If any student reports a threat by another student to any adult in the school it must be recorded on a written threat assessment form. Each assessment is followed up personally by Rowles, the security chief.
Charles Rowles: If it is determined to be something that needs to be looked at we go to the building and determine how serious this is. We talk to students, we talk to the parents.
Rowles runs regular lock-down drills in the schools in which students are urged to tell an adult when someone or something appears odd. Three hundred participated in a mock shooting drill this summer, which was filmed for training.
Charles Rowles: We've had a number of incidents when a student came to an adult and said so and so has a knife on them. It's hard to say what would have happened if we had not intervened with it.
Akron had a phone tip line but abandoned it a few years ago because the messages were rarely related to violence.
In 2000, Cleveland Schools hired a former Deputy Police Chief from Indiana as the district's Safety and Security Executive Director. David A. Coleman added bike patrols, increased metal detector sweeps and installed digital camera systems in some school buildings. Coleman retired in July of this year, and the district has not responded to calls from WCPN seeking information on whether a replacement has been named.
The same month that the Cleveland School Director retired, The Plain Dealer reported that crime in the schools increased even though there were 5,000 fewer students.
Parents of students at SuccessTech say they complained that only one guard was on duty at the school and that he was assigned to guard the administration floor, not roam the halls.
Cleveland schools CEO Eugene Sanders said there were a total of 200 security officers in district schools every day, 85 of those in the high school. But he would not explain how 14-year-old Asa Coon, while on suspension, was able to re-enter his school and open fire.
Sanders, however, announced through a spokeswoman, that he will reveal later today how the Cleveland system will increase security and communication about potentially violent students.
Kymberli Hagelberg, 90.3.