School security leaders from across North Texas are gathered in Richardson Wednesday morning for an important safety summit.
Some of the country's most experienced school safety experts are in town to attend the Region 10 Education Service Center’s ‘Safety First’ Summit.
Region 10 ESC – one of several centers established by the state – provides superintendents, campus administrators, campus staff, and district law enforcement across the North Texas region with relevant training, guidance, information, and resources to improve all aspects of school safety and security.
On Wednesday, hundreds of district police chiefs, officers, superintendents, and other school district leaders from all over the area shared ideas and solutions to keep kids safe in schools. Even representatives from the Texas Education Agency and the Texas School Safety Center were in attendance, the guiding forces for school safety practices in the state.
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The summit comes just one day after an emotional community meeting held in response to a school shooting at Wilmer-Hutchins High School in Dallas on Friday. A student got a gun past metal detectors and shot another student in the leg. The injured student is still recovering while the student who shot him is in jail.
Safety experts say the superintendents, school police chiefs, directors, staff, and leadership face unprecedented social changes, potential targeted acts of violence, and catastrophic events in schools.
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The goal of the summit is to use all the learned lessons to build stronger plans for safety and security.
“What this does, is we're bringing people together to get formal education, to hear people's stories, to learn information that they can acquire and take back to their school districts or their schools or wherever they are,” said John Lawton, program coordinator for Region 10 ESC.
This marks the sixth year of the Safety First Summit.
Organizers say this is a unique moment for law enforcement and educators to be in the same room on topics like this. That sometimes doesn't always happen, especially for rural schools or even districts that don't have their police department.
"Region 10 ESC represents about a million kids in public schools,” said Craig Miller, retired Dallas ISD chief of police and a regular speaker at the yearly summit. "I think it's really key events like this that we have not only law enforcement but that we have school administration. Sometimes those two sides don't always see the problem the same. So getting them together to understand and to learn from one another is really valuable. Everybody sees their roles sometimes different than what the other side sees their role.”
There were also design experts and architects on hand to talk about the aspect of entrances, which schools are still trying to find ways to improve.
"I think the value in a situation like this [summit] is hearing those architects and being able to sit down with them and say, 'Hey, maybe this is a better way to develop this entrance,'" said Miller. "One of the issues going on right now is when we talk about guns and how guns get on the campuses. When you have entrance and exit doors, how can you limit the number of locations that students can come into the school but at the same time be able to get a lot of kids into the school? So I think working with the development and the design of schools is really important."
Aside from school safety, other big topics during breakout sessions include the fentanyl crisis in Texas, human trafficking, and a deeper look at what happened at the deadly shooting at the Allen premium outlets last year.
There will be another summit happening this fall to start the new school year, which will also have an entire component focused on youth mental health.
