The Oregon-Davis School Corporation continues its efforts to step up school safety, with some help from the State of Indiana. Superintendent Dr. Don Harman says the corporation’s two schools will each be getting a handheld metal detector, as part of Governor Eric Holcomb’s program to provide them free of charge to schools around the state.
“It’s not going to be something that we’re going to use daily,” Harman explains. “It’s not something that we’re going to check every visitor who walks in. I would envision that we’ll have the metal detector in an emergency situation, if we’re aware of possibly a parent or student having a weapon, that we may have to search them. I would say that’s how we envision using these metal detectors at this time.”
Harman adds that Oregon-Davis will also be updating security cameras, thanks to a Secured School Safety Matching Grant for just under $35,000. “The grant will be used to put new cameras in all of our buses, as well as update eight cameras on our campus,” he says.
Last week, the Oregon-Davis School Board also finalized the School Emergency and Crisis Response Plan for the upcoming school year. “We’ve worked very diligently on that,” Harman says. “Our school resource officer John Kohles assisted in that. We take crisis and school emergency very seriously, so we approved that. We will be giving all of our staff training with our new procedures.” Harman previously said the school corporation will be adopting the ALICE procedure for responding to potential intruders.
The school board also officially reappointed Kohles as resource officer for the 2018-2019 school year, during last week’s meeting.
