As the school year winds down, work is already underway for next year and there’s an added focus on school safety. A number of North Country schools recently received extra funding to do just that.
“I think that learning in this environment is not a privilege, but it’s something that you deserve,” South Jefferson High School Senior Lacy Smith said.
Smith is a class leader and has a student seat with the Board of Education. She said students feeling safe in school is her biggest hope.
“If you’re coming here and you’re going home feeling like you don’t want to come back, then something’s wrong,” she added.
It’s a belief shared by fellow senior leader and student member of the Board of Education, Timothy Renzi.
“You don’t want a learning environment where kids don’t feel safe or feel like they’re being harassed,” he said.
While a state comptroller report from February shows serious life safety incidents in New York are at the lowest levels since the COVID-19 pandemic, drug incidents are up to 6.5 per 1,000 students; bullying is up to nearly 18 incidents per 1,000 students; and cyberbullying continues to grow, with more than four incidents per 1,000 students.
It’s why these kids are so focused on creating that welcoming environment.
“When students are on board, and students also all want a safe school environment where they can feel like they can learn and participate, that’s when you’re going to get the safest school environment you can have,” Renzi added.
Over the past seven years, a program called ‘Safe Schools Endeavor’ has seen the Northern New York Community Foundation provide $140,000 to promote safety in schools in Jefferson and Lewis counties. It’s enabled them to purchase everything from cameras and communication equipment to gates and even medical devices. South Jefferson says it is making an impact.
“It’s just one way that we can help intervene and provide students the support that they need to make sure that they’re healthy and safe,” Superintendent Christina Chamberlain said.
These schools across the Jefferson-Lewis BOCES region are also a part of the Sandy Hook Promise program. They have an anonymous tip line where they can call in. It promotes “see something, say something” without the fear of retaliation.
“That could really stop something from snowballing into something much worse. And that’s why it’s effective,” Renzi said.
“We’ve seen almost 80 tips come through,” Jefferson-Lewis BOCES Director of Health, Safety and Security Ray Filley said. “Out of those 80 tips, eight have been life safety. Out of those eight, it is a high likelihood that they’re led to some intervention and got students help that that needed the help and maybe prevented a crisis from happening.”
If it saves a life, or prevents just one student from being bullied, Filley says all of these programs, all of the effort from staff and students, is well worth it.
This year, the program provided a number of schools with money to buy defibrillators – for use in the school, playgrounds and athletic fields.
