School officials across Northwest Arkansas continue to evaluate crisis plans a little more than a month after a heavily armed gunman killed 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

The gunman reportedly forced his way into the building, defeating an intercom system that required visitors to be buzzed into the building.

“It causes you to really look and investigate what your plans are,” said Jim Ford, superintendent of the 1,900-student Ozark School District in Franklin County. “Before this happened, I felt like we were very proactive.”

School district administrators report that they are checking exterior doors, to make sure all but the mainentrances are locked during the school day. In some districts, only the main entrance is unlocked at elementary, middle and junior high schools, but the rules are different for high schools with multiple buildings. Districts have assembled safety committees to study options for bolstering security.

A free seminar on Feb. 20 in Fort Smith will assist districts in preventing and responding to emergencies in school. The seminar is being organized by Conner Eldridge, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Arkansas, and Bill Hollenbeck, Sebastian County sheriff.

The seminar will assist districts with their security and crisis plans, said Joyce Snow, assistant to Eldridge.

“Some of the schools are so small they don’t have as many choices for resources,” Snow said. “They’re trying to acquaint them with the law enforcement so they can put together a plan.”

Since the Sandy Hook shooting in December, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Arkansas has reached out to at least 25 school districts. Officials from the office were interested in learning about the security and crisis plans and offered strategies for schools and offered suggestions for improving security. Suggestions included updating windows to make them resistant to bullets and “buzz-in” systems at front entrances.

Schools with buzz-in systems lock their main entrances. Visitors would use an intercom outside the building to identify themselves. An office assistant could view the visitor with a camera and would have a way to unlock the door for the visitor from the office.

The “Preparing Your School for a Crisis” seminar will begin at 8 a.m. at the Fort Smith Convention Center.

The seminar is free and is intended for law enforcement, school administrators and school security personnel. Registration is due by Feb. 18 to Arkansas Safe Schools at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Arkansas. Information is available through the U.S. Attorney’s Office at (479) 783-5125, usaarw.safeschools@ usdoj.gov or through the Sebastian County Sheriff’s Office at (479) 783-1051.

In Ozark, Ford said he had confidence in the district’s plan for emergencies and said the district tests the plan regularly with students. Since the Sandy Hook shooting, school administrators in Ozark have considered changing how they schedule drills, including conducting some drills during recess or lunch.

A recent emergency drill during lunch created a greater sense of urgency over an irritation that turned out to be a safety concern, Ford said. A new phone system had replaced an older public announcement system at the school, but the volume of the speakers in the cafeteria was too low. Cafeteria workers couldn’t hear the announcement during the drill, he said.

Ford said the district aims to balance the need to plan for emergencies without distracting children from learning.

“We want our schools to be a happy safe place where education is No. 1,” he said. “We don’t want to do so much of that that they’re nervous all the time.”

Ozark school officials are considering adding surveillance equipment, making exterior glass doors and windows shatter-proofand pricing buzzin systems, Ford said.

“We’re satisfied with the amount of training we’re putting on with our teachers,” Ford said. “Our teachers are very diligent about keeping their[classroom] doors locked.”

A safety committee started meeting on Jan. 2 to develop recommendations for upgrading security in the Alma School District, said Pamm Treece, director of student services for the district of 3,360 students inCrawford County.

“There wasn’t a school in the nation that was ready for what happened at Sandy Hook,” Treece said. “We’re all learning and investigating.”

Suggestions related to security include providing armed school resource officers on every campus instead of one for four buildings, adding more surveillance cameras and including photos on name badges of school personnel to identify clearly the employees that belong on a campus, Treece said.

The district also is studying enclosing classrooms on campuses built in the 1970s with an “open classroom concept,”Treece said. Buildings with the open classroom concept have six classrooms in a wing that are divided by eight-foot storage partitions, but the partitions do not reach the ceiling and the doorways do not have doors. Enclosing those classrooms would give each classroom a door to lock, she said.

At Sandy Hook, staff and teachers were well-trained on lockdown procedures and the campus had a buzz-in system for visitors, said Ken Trump, president of a Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services consulting firm.

“We certainly did not get the desired result of saving all lives,” he said.

But without those measures in place, more deaths could have occurred, said Trump, who has more than 25 years of experience in school security and is the author of a 1998 book Practical School Security: Basic Guidelines for Safe and Secure Schools.

“We’re dealing with human behavior and some extreme cases where there are going to be incidents that slip through the cracks behind our best efforts,” Trump said. “You do your best to prevent it, and you do your best to prepare to manage it.”

Schools should give priority to training staff, students and parents on security and what to do during emergencies, Trump said. Security equipment is a useful tool for a well-trained campus. Without training, an intercom buzz-in system would not be effective if parents were not educated on entering the building one at a time, Trump said. The security tool isn’t effective if visitors let everyone behind them in the building with them when the door is unlocked.

In Fort Smith, a district crisis team, in existence since 1990, meets monthly to discuss any issues, to consider changes to the crisis response plan and to review practices at the campuses, said Randy Bridges, director of student services and coordinator of the crisis team. Each campus has a separate crisis team overseen by the district team. Monthly meetings concerning security include discussions of current topics in school security, training for staff and problems campuses have experienced, Bridges said. The district requires all 26 campuses to plan drills for emergency situations, the most likely to occur being a tornado or fire. One section of the emergency plan covers responding to an active shooter scenario, as in Connecticut.

In the event of an active shooter, school staff and students train to get quiet and out of sight, Bridges said. All doors are locked.

“Does that guarantee everyone’s safety? No,” he said. “What we want to do is to slow the person down and buy time and try to make it as difficult as possible for someone who is intent on doing harm to our children.”

The district of roughly 14,050 students is in the middle of a five-year project to outfit all schools with high-definition video camera surveillance systems that range from roughly $30,000 for an elementary school to $90,000 for a senior high school, Gooden said.

Camera monitoring varies by campus, but those monitoring the cameras would include front office staff, school resource officers and principals, district spokesman Zena Featherston said.

The district is testing some ideas to improve security around the perimeter of campuses, Gooden said.

“Cameras don’t prevent anything,” Gooden said. “What a camera does is allow you to see if something is amiss on the campus, in the neighborhood.”

Fort Smith School District relies on the vigilance of staff, said Benny Gooden, Fort Smith superintendent. A good relationship with law enforcement is another important component, Gooden said. The district splits the cost of two armed school resource officers with the Fort Smith Police Department. The officers are based at the two senior high schools.Gooden, however, misses a program that allowed the police department to place bicycle officers in neighborhoods. The district provided those officers with a telephone and a desk inside schools in those neighborhoods.

Fort Smith police spokesman Sgt. Daniel Grubbs explained that the department placed bicycle officers in neighborhoods through federal Community Oriented Policing Services grants. The grants are awarded for a limited time, and if the grants are not renewed, the city must pay for those additional officers with the city budget.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 15 on 02/03/2013