Through the many hardships over the past several months, we have all had to learn new skills and make new changes. Now, three months after the events in January and February, we have entered a more stable time and are ready to recap on everything our community has done. We sat down with Superintendent Dori Leyko and Acting Principal Ashley Schwarzbek on April 7, 2023 for an extensive meeting discussing the safety changes that have been made in our school. 

After hearing lots of feedback from community members at the special board meeting in late January, the school board knew they had to change something to keep the students and staff safe, especially after the multiple fights and threats throughout December and January. According to Leyko and Schwarzbek, over the past three months, ELHS administration has instituted more camera coverage and personnel to cover it, new security staff, panic buttons in the office, began working on hiring a In-School Suspension (ISS) supervisor, better communication, and are working on getting all staff de-escalation training.

“ We just are making sure that everybody really explicitly knows what the expectations are so that they can follow them most successfully,” Schwarzbek said.

Jumping the gun

In December of 2022, administration had a school safety assessment done by a private investigation company Secure Education Consultants out of Grand Rapids. The company spent three days in the district and about half a day at each building interviewing staff, assessing the safety procedures, hardware, policies and infrastructure.

 “They gave us this really long report that we got in January of recommendations or considerations,” Leyko said. “At this point, we were already going down this road of looking at changes we might want to make.” 

One of the many suggestions they made was a modification of the district’s fire drill procedure to prevent putting staff and students in a more dangerous position. The procedure that has been in place for many years has students and staff swarm the hallways and exit the building in a chaotic manner immediately after the fire alarm goes off. They suggested waiting until they could confirm there was a fire before releasing everyone outside the building. 

“It’s important we make sure no one pulled the alarm to put students in a more dangerous situation,” Leyko said. 

Calming the panic

After the special board meeting on Jan. 30, the board and administration decided to install more accessible panic buttons in the main offices of all East Lansing Public Schools. The panic buttons release a magnet to all exterior doors in the school, causing them to immediately close and lock.

“It [also] sends a notification to all of the district administrative staff, and to the other building principals as well,” Schwarzbek said. “That way they know that there’s something happening here at the high school or somebody was targeting a different building.” 

Administration is also looking into ways to make the high school building more safe. At the  elementary schools that have been rebuilt, locks were installed on the interior classroom doors so that they could be locked from the inside in emergency situations. The high school is looking into installing new internal locking mechanisms on doors, however, this requires time to put in place.

 “That way, teachers and staff don’t even have to think about locking their door if something like that happens,” Leyko said. 

Leyko remembers during her time as a teacher at Haslett Public Schools that her doors could only lock from the outside. It was difficult for her to navigate during drills. First, she would have to find her keys, which were never where she remembered them to be, exit her room to lock the door, come back in to close it, and only then would her door be locked. 

“That time in an emergency can be really valuable,” Leyko said.

Talking it out

Some changes don’t affect the structure of the school. For example, the administration is working on a more developed ISS program. ISS is a way for students with behavioral issues to face consequences while still being able to have access to food and learning instruction. Currently, when a student is given ISS, they spend their day with Schwarzbek, Associate Principal Quiana Davis or Interim Associate Principal Jeffrey Lampi. 

“This is problematic because sometimes we have stuff that comes up and then the supervision of that student unfortunately falls to other office staff, which isn’t really a good system,” Schwarzbek said. “So ISS has always existed, but we’re looking into how we could expand that and make it a little bit more systematic.”

Following the late January incident, one of the biggest criticisms the school faced was the lack of communication. Parents were appalled by how little the school had told them and led to the school reviewing and ultimately adopting a new communication system. After the district’s technology department attended a public relations conference prior to January, many new ideas were brought back including a South Dakotan schools’ communication protocol.

Their protocol suggested that Leyko reach out to the community the morning that an incident occurs and then give a timeline for follow up. 

“So part of that was learning that as long as people know when to expect communication next,” Leyko said.  “It lowers anxiety and doesn’t make people wonder when they’re going to hear something or why you’re not hearing something.”  

In with the old 

Despite all the changes made, a lot of the focus was on revising old policies and enforcing them more. 

“A lot of what we’ve done is just restating the expectations to students,”Schwarzbek said. 

The revisions to the tardy policy were not made in direct response to school safety. The new tardy policy states that if a person is tardy for their fourth or fifth hour more than two times in one week, they receive a lunch detention. This is in addition to the 20 percent tardy rule that is already in place (being tardy to more than six periods in a week also results in detention.) The changes were made to enforce attendance in students’ fourth and fifth hours because teachers were upset about lost instruction time due to students who participate in off-campus lunch. “What we’ve done in the last couple of months is just continue to tighten up and make sure that rules are actually being implemented and enforced,” Schwarzbek said. “It’s one of those things where we want to have structure and support within our school to make sure that everyone knows what they’re supposed to be doing and that there are reasonable consequences if you don’t follow the instructions.”

Addressing the rumors

Misinformation often leads to chaos so it’s important to clearly classify what’s true and what’s not. Many students have heard rumors claiming that the school will install cell phone jammers, which Leyko and Schwarzbek confirmed is something none of the administration heard or thought of. The purpose of the cell phone jammers would be to block the connection on a students phone while on the high school campus.

 “I don’t know anything about cell phone jammers, that seems like a myth,” Schwarzbek said. “I can’t imagine that would ever be anything we never do because I use my phone every day.”

The two other biggest rumors were a school wide cell phone ban, and a backpack ban/clear backpacks. Following the January incidents, community members requested for the school to ban cellphones because they were the only way students could spread information and threats.  

“Any phone changes that we make for next year will really be the result of a year long of teachers looking at the policy,” Schwarzbek said.

Others hoped to ban backpacks or instate clear backpacks so students couldn’t hide weapons. The board carefully analyzed both of these suggestions and created a poll for the community to vote on it.

 “Things like clear backpacks were like, there’s not really a whole lot of support for that, and in doing it, it creates other problems,” Leyko said.

As administration continues to address the concerns from January, they would like community members to share their input on the changes being made. They can do so by emailing or reaching out to the administration or attending a monthly board meeting.