PEORIA, Ill. (WMBD) — As Peoria recovers from the violence that has occurred over the past week or so, Peoria Public Schools is working to make sure their schools remain a safe place for students.
Joining forces with Peoria Public Schools is the Peoria Police Department. Police Chief Eric Echevarria along with other officers handed out pizza and showed support to Manual High School students on Friday. Only around 100 students showed up to class that day.
“This is not saying anything against the kids that didn’t show up, we understand that completely, but these kids who live in an area where this violence was occurring showed up to school that day, we wanted to go over there and show some support and some love, let them know that we’re here for them,” Echevarria said.
District 2 Peoria Public School board member Gregory Wilson said that while there were no hard lockdowns implemented last week, there were increased security measures.
“Some of those schools that are near some of those crime hotspots, we were able to specifically target and increase our security and our presence at those schools so we could mitigate any threats of violence,” Wilson said.
At the next school board meeting on the 11th, Wilson said he wants to bring up his idea of adding a school resource officer to every school in the district.
“I want to see a school resource officer inside of every building in our district, right now we don’t have that, I believe we have about 32 school resource officers on staff, I am going to ask and I want to look into getting 42, that way we have one in each building,” he said.
One thing that has caused some confusion is what defines a soft lockdown. School Board President Michael Murphy was able to clearly define what it is.
“When we’re on a soft lockdown, basically that just means that unless there is a necessity for someone to be coming in and out of the building, those people are just asked to not come in while we’re in session and we may need some more additional support and extra security during a soft lockdown than we would under a normal school day,” Murphy said.
WMBD has reached out to Peoria Public Schools’ Director of Communications and Community Relations Haleemah Na’Allah. She texted in response, “We are no longer touching on last week’s occurrences. PPS is not at the center of the situation.”
