Nancy Edmonds Hanson
hansonnanc@gmail.com

The growing tide of school shootings across the U.S. – 24 involving injuries or deaths 2018, according to Education Week magazine, plus 18 so far this year – keeps security at the top of minds in Moorhead’s public schools.
“Our first responsibility is to our students, teachers and staff, so they can learn and work in a safe environment,” says Dan Markert, director of information systems, whose responsibilities include the district’s high-tech security measures. Some protocols were already in place when he joined the school system in 1998. Just a year later, the Columbine High School shooting forced school safety to the forefront for schools all over the country, spurring the Moorhead district to begin the long process of dialing up security measures to reduce the vulnerabilities that suddenly seemed glaringly apparent.
How about all those open doors, with children and parents and visitors coming and going? Visitors haven’t had open access and permission to roam the halls of Moorhead schools for at least five years, Dan notes. Each school now has a single entry point, most designated as Door 1. The exceptions are at Moorhead High School, where the main entrance is Door 13 – out of no fewer than 26 – and the Probstfield Education Center, where the layout of the former (and future) elementary school made Door 3 the logical choice.
Visitors must show a state-issued photo ID, usually a driver’s license, before they’re buzzed into the main hallway. Once reviewed by staff members, the identification is now scanned by the district’s digital Visitor Management System. The computerized system instantly checks the cards against a database of sexual offenders. “No I D? No admission,” Dan asserts.
The system aids in monitoring that students are only released to authorized parents, grandparents and other parent-designated contacts. Student information data is also scanned against a “guardian exclusion list” to screen for those barred from contact by the courts. “If we can’t confirm the identity of someone picking up a student for a doctor’s appointment or some other reason, we may bring the student out to them,” Dan says. “In that case, we watch the student’s reaction closely to confirm they know who it is.”
The Moorhead Police Department provides full-time school resource officers on campus – one each at Horizon Middle School and the high school, and two who each rotate between two elementaries.
The cloud-based high-tech VMS systems were added to every school as part of the security upgrades installed over the past two years. Funded as a part of the $78 million bond issue passed in 2015, the security improvements included purchase of the $5,000 systems and hardening the entrances of the elementary, middle and high schools.
Those renovations went much farther. Pairs of doors with electronic locks have been installed to partition separate areas of the schools. “They respond automatically to lock-down switches,” Dan explains. “There are panic buttons in the office and at strategic locations around the building.”
The sets of automatic doors, which can be shut automatically, can be opened in only one direction – the escape path toward the outside. “They let you swing through to move toward the exit. That’s critical, of course,” the director notes.
More than 700 video cameras monitor public areas inside and out of the schools. It can be accessed by police officers accompanied by the principal if they provide a written request for a specific time and location. Dan says the footage has proven most useful to date in the parking lot: “It’s been useful for fender benders.”
Safety drills are a normal part of school life in 2019. Minnesota law mandates a minimum of five lock-down drills in every school, along with more traditional fire and tornado drills and one to practice bus evacuation. “We usually have more than that because many things can trigger a lockdown,” Dan says. Classroom doors might be locked if a student is having a medical crisis, sparing them the embarrassment and others the panic of seeing an ambulance crew entering their school.
Others might be triggered as a precaution by the police, as when Moorhead High went into lockdown on reports of shots fired in a trailer court half a mile away. Some drills, too, may be triggered by something as random as a youngster foolishly pulling a fire alarm to see what happens. Nevertheless, every drill is as realistic as possible, including everything from how to shelter in place to the process of reunifying classes off site, as would happen if students and teachers had to flee in a real shooting emergency. The district’s automatic communication system handles another realistic concern; parents are always notified of drills and lockdowns through its automatic telephone, email and texting system.
Moorhead’s protocols on handling emergency system follow the guidelines developed by Cass-Clay Unified School Response, a collaboration originally developed by Fargo administrators in 2006. CCUSR brings together representatives of every emergency response organization in the two counties, from police and deputies to ambulance crews and all 18 Clay and Cass school districts, with transportation director Mike Steffen representing Moorhead. The group has developed guidelines and training materials that are used in preparing faculty and staff with clear guidelines on what to do if the unimaginable occurs.
Those practices have changed, Dan says, as the professionals involved have learned more about best practices. “We used to say, ‘Shelter in place in your classroom.’ Now there’s a second option. If you can hear an immediate threat – gunshots – or if you’re told to over the loudspeakers, you run.” Each building has a designated location for reunification after the emergency is over. “If you shoo 30 kids out of your classroom,” he notes, “they have to know where to go afterwards.”
Each school’s training and response is monitored by its BERT – its building emergency response team, including administrators and custodians. They, in turn, report to DERT, their districtwide counterparts. “None of us operate in a bubble,” the director points out. “We interact with other schools and with professionals on coming up with best practices to keep our kids safe.”
So far, the director reports, none of the increasing measures taken to insure Moorhead students’ safety have been needed in true emergency situations. He fervently hopes it stays that way: “We do everything we can to keep our kids and our staff safe and secure, and we’ve been very fortunate. Our drills have been far worse than anything that’s really happened here.
“Knock on wood!”