C’view board discusses school safety

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

CONVOY — In the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school shootings, it wasn’t surprising that much of Crestview Superintendent Mike Estes’ report during Monday’s meeting of the Crestview Local Board of Education centered on school safety.

“It’s a little ironic that we’ve been in the process of reviewing our school safety plan and pretty much wrapped it up last Wednesday,” Estes said, noting that Chief Deputy Keith Allen was also at the school last Thursday to talk about plans for the district’s annual Safe Schools drill.

“In the past, ours has been pretty much staged, we knew when it was coming, what time it was coming,” the superintendent said, noting that next year the event will be done as a surprise drill.

That decision wasn’t an easy one, though, Estes noted, but administrators felt that going to a surprise drill was the best way to really gauge the district’s ability to keep its students safe.

“We’re in a village and when you start bringing in police cars with lights and sirens and fire trucks with lights and sirens, parents get pretty concerned about what’s going on with their kids,” he noted as a reason for the district’s past reluctance to stage a surprise drill.

The district is also looking at putting up two tall fences that would allow students to travel from the main Crestview school building to the detached vocational agriculture building, but not allow anyone else access to the building without first going into the main building.

The Crestview superintendent freely acknowledged that the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings have lent a sense of immediacy to the district’s school safety planning.

“You come out of that meeting before that tragedy thinking ‘we’ve got time to work on this’ and now you’re thinking ‘we’ve got to this in place as soon as possible’,” he said.

Estes also said he plans to push for a “school resource officer” for the district, possibly through a program like the federal “Cops in Schools” program.

“It’s a shame that it’s come to that, but we have to protect our kids,” he noted.

On a more positive note, the generosity of Crestview students was highlighted during administrator reports to the board.

Crestview Elementary Principal Kathy Mollenkopf noted that her students raised $1,600 for the Pennies for People fundraiser that will help 23 local families at Christmas. The Crestview Middle School program raised an additional $1,700 in student donations to be spent on five local families, while the high school’s Penny War raised between $800 and $900 for needy families.

All three principals also reported on their schools’ parent-teacher conferences, with Middle School Principal Dave Bowen and Mollenkopf noting they had excellent attendance for the conferences. Principal Mike Biro said the high school attendance was less than it had been the past two years, and said he felt that was because parents now have the ability to monitor students’ grades online. Biro said parent log-ins to that program are up substantially.

Also Monday, three Crestview students, Josh Dempsey, Nicholas Dealey and Cora Finfrock, were inducted into the National Technical Honor Society at Vantage Career Center, while another student, Olivia Heckler, will be making a presentation at a meeting of the Junior Achievement Board of Directors today at Willow Bend Country Club.

Bowen noted that the CMS spelling bee would be held Monday, January 7, 2013.

The board also reappointed Lonnie Nedderman as the board’s representative to Vantage’s board and accepted a donation of $500 from the local Walmart for the district student incentive/educational programs.

Also during the meeting, the board went into executive session to discuss personnel issues, but took no action following the session.

The next regularly scheduled meeting of the Crestview Local Board of Education will be at 6 p.m. Monday, January 14, 2013, in the district boardroom.