By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
Tensions ran high last week among a few parents over the handling of an incident at Moapa Valley High School where a student allegedly made open threats to classmates of doing violence to school staff and fellow students. One local couple even kept their daughter home from school for much of last week over fears of her safety.
Jeremy Byers said that his daughter had returned home from school terrified on Friday, October 24 after an interaction with another student during class. Byers said that his daughter had listened to a sophomore student threaten to kill people at the school during a class where they share the same table with two other students.
One of the other students at the table recorded some of the threats on a cell phone during the class, Byers said.
“He went into details on just who he was going to shoot: teachers, administrators, students; and he talked about specifics on exactly how he was going to kill various people,” Byers said. “It really frightened her (his daughter).”
After class, the students, including Byers’ daughter, took the recording to the Dean’s office and reported the incident. Byers said that school administrators called the police and the students were asked to make a report.
Metro officials confirmed that a juvenile was arrested that day for making threats and was charged with a gross misdemeanor. Few details in the matter were released because the suspect is a minor.
Byers said that his daughter was so shaken by the incident that she would not return to school on Monday. When she finally did return to school in days following, she was shocked to discover that the student had already been allowed to return to school, Byers said.
Upset by this, Byers’ wife Teresa went to the school on Wednesday to discuss the matter with the administration. But she said she got very little by way of resolution.
“I told them that my daughter had been threatened by this kid and they told me to just go home and not worry about it,” Teresa said. “That’s not good enough. If you try to kill yourself you are put under a 72 hour investigation out of school. But this kid is threatening to kill other people and here he is right back in school again. He needs to be evaluated and he needs to get help. Everything needs to stop right now and focus on getting him healthy and mentally stable for his own safety and all the students around him.”
After feeling unsatisfied with the response from the school, the Byers called a TV news station in Las Vegas and requested coverage of the problem. A news crew came to the community, interviewed Byers, and aired a report on Thursday evening. This set off a firestorm of comment and criticism from concerned parents on online social media outlets. Many parents complained about not being notified by the district about details of the case.
But school administrators said that the law requires that details of student incidents, as well as any specifics of how discipline is determined, must remain completely confidential.
“We really can’t discuss any details of this specific case at all,” said MVHS Principal Rod Adams. “I know that is unsatisfying to people. But it is to protect the students involved.”
But Adams emphasized that student safety and security has always been paramount to him and his staff.
“We take student safety on our campus very seriously and our number one priority is providing a safe and secure learning environment,” he said. “All behavior incidents on our campus are treated seriously and are evaluated following prescribed guidelines.”
Adams assured that his staff had employed all of the protocol set in place by the district to properly determine the risk and to assure the safety of the school and its students.
“It is our goal as an administrative team to be fair, firm and consistent with student discipline,” he said. “When required, we enlist the assistance of Metro Police and district specialists to assist with investigations to ensure we have covered all aspects of an incident. This has been followed with all recent behavior issues.”
The incident served to shed light on the broader topic of school security in the Moapa Valley communities. With studies showing that rural schools are typically the vulnerable targets for ‘single shooter’ violence, local residents and school administrators have, for years now, been calling for the Clark County School District (CCSD) to address security deficiencies at local schools.
This is a topic that has been a special focus for Overton resident Shanan Kelly. Kelly is a local resident officer for Metro Police. He also serves on the Moapa Valley Community Education Advisory Board (MVCEAB) as the chair of its School Security task force.
“This incident shows what we already knew,” Kelly said. “Our kids are vulnerable at school. There are very few protections in place in the local schools if the worse were to happen.”
Kelly admits that he has been frustrated with MVCEAB, school administrators and the school district for being slow to recognize security as a high priority action item.
“They’d rather go after the easy political issues like sex-ed or how long of a lunch break the kids get than to get in and deal with the fundamental issue of keeping kids safe,” Kelly said. “I know that school administrators have, in the past, approached CCSD to try to find a solution and it seems like the district has buried its head in the sand and pretended its not a problem at all.”
In early 2011, just after the tragic shooting incident at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, then-MVHS principal Grant Hanevold met with CCSD Police Department officials on the matter of security.
Hal Mortensen, who was then the Vice Principal of MVHS, sat in on those meetings. Mortensen recalled that Hanevold’s approach was to bring equity to the local schools. The local administrators pointed out that the CCSD currently provided $50,000 per year in funding to pay for resource officers from local police departments to be stationed at schools in Mesquite and in Boulder City. Hanevold suggested that a similar arrangement be made with Metro for local schools, Mortensen said. But the idea wasn’t treated very seriously, he said.
“At the end of the meeting they said that they would go back and talk about it,” Mortensen said. “But nothing ever happened.”
Principal Adams agreed that improvements could be made to local school security. Currently the school relies upon Metro to respond when an issue arises.
“We call Metro, not because there is any formal agreement with them to provide service to us, but because it would take a lot longer for CCSD police to respond from Las Vegas,” Adams said. “The local officers have always responded out of the goodness of their hearts; not because they have to, but because they want to help the community and they have an interest in keeping the kids safe. They’ve always been great to work with.”
But Shanan Kelly said that this arrangement would simply not be good enough if a serious security breach were to occur where shots are being fired in a school.
“People don’t realize how quickly something like this can happen,” Kelly said. “The big problem is response time. You want an immediate response; not ten minutes or thirty minutes of an hour and a half. By that time it would be too late and the outcome would most likely be tragic. Really, the only way that you are going to guarantee a quick response time is by having a resource officer assigned to be there on campus.”
Adams pledged that he would rekindle Hanevold’s efforts to address the security concerns at the local schools.
“I’m aware of the efforts in the past, but not of all the details,” Adams said. “But now I plan to sit down with Mr. Hanevold in the near future and learn the details of where those efforts left off. Then we will pick them up and pursue it again.”
