Wake County high schoolers will be asked their
opinions on school safety in a survey set for next month.
The survey, presented to the
school board on Wednesday, will ask students about how schools can be safer,
whether they feel safe now, and whether they’re likely to report concerns using
existing reporting channels, such as the Say Something reporting app.
The school board’s safety
and security committee also discussed how they plan to train students, school employees and community members
of the district’s planned
replacement for its “code red” system.
On Wednesday, district officials said they want students to feel safe in school so that they are better prepared to learn.
They’ll connect the survey with student email accounts and monitor response rates, asking schools to push the survey if not enough students have responded to it. A response rate of 10%, for example, would be too low, said Kendrick Scott, the district’s senior director of the Office of Security. If they need to, the school system may reopen the survey to get more responses.
Board Member Tyler Swanson, a former high school special education teacher, said he was worried about students not feeling motivated to fill out a survey in the middle of the school year.
“Just like adults, if I get a survey, I might not want to participate,” he said. “If we’re adults, and we’re thinking that, how are we going to incentivize students?”
Scott said the district wanted to wait to survey students until the middle of the year so that high ninth graders could get to know their schools better before being asked to assess them.
Swanson wondered if the school should send it to a personal email account instead of a school one.
Board Chairman Chris Heagarty said he thought using students’ school emails would help the district better track who has responded and could even be used to compile data on responses for some kind of reward for participating.
Students told WRAL News they care about safety, especially given the occasional report of a school shooting.
Yarik Conrad, a Cary High student, said he generally feels safe at school.
“But with increasing news of school shootings… I’ve been feeling less and less safe,” he said, adding that he’s concerned about gun laws — something the school board has no control over.
But Conrad said his school only has one school resource officer, something the board could do something about.
“It’s a pretty big campus, just a single school resource officer,” Conrad said. “I feel like it’s just too much for him to manage.”
The district plans to survey high school
students Dec. 1-12. A draft of the survey is attached to the district’s
presentation plans to cover violence, bullying and mental health, among other
things. The draft includes open-ended questions about how school safety can be
improved.
District-level survey results will be shared
publicly, but school-level results will only be shared with school
administrators and the school board in a closed board session. A lot of safety
issues are discussed only in closed session, for fear of exposing any
vulnerabilities to a potential bad actor.
There are no plans to survey other groups, such as staff
and parents.
The school system has been looking into security
improvements over the years, following an audit in 2019 of security protocols.
It’s rolled out a voluntary panic button app for employees, launched a visitor
screening system, and started the process of changing
the “code red” system to be clearer in messaging, among other
things. It hasn’t
invested in metal detectors or weapons detection systems for daily school
entry, unlike some other systems nearby, such as Edgecombe County Schools.
Students reported for crimes in schools have
gone down in Wake and across the state after peaking just after the
pandemic. Before the pandemic, students reported for crimes had gone down
pretty consistently for many years.
But there are a couple of outliers. The number
of students cited for possession of drugs has continued to go up, and the
number of students accused ot assault against a school employee has also been
rising. There were 204 Wake students accused of that during the 2023-24 school
year. That’s the most recent year for which data are available.
