EDITORIAL: Don’t Send Us Back To The End Of The Line

Only about fifteen minutes after the Moapa Valley Community Education Advisory Board (MVCEAB) meeting began on Friday, the bell rang. From the MVHS library, where the meeting took place, those in attendance could look out of the large windows and see kids filing out into the quad area for their morning nutrition break. The area just outside the window soon filled up with kids greeting each other, talking, joking around, and having a good time together. It was a peaceful, fun and wholly uneventful time period in the middle of an average school day.
At least it was this time.

But inside the library, the adults were talking about a myriad of unsettling “what-ifs.” They talked about how no protective barrier exists between that quad area and the outside world. They talked about how anyone could walk onto the central part of the school – undeterred and unimpeded – and cause any kind of trouble. They talked about how this small community, though admittedly peaceful and quiet, is a statistical dead ringer for small towns across the country that have already experienced tragic active assailant incidents in their schools. All of these sobering items were talked about while kids gathered in the quad, just outside the window, exposed to a multitude of potential dangers.

The request from the MVCEAB was simple. The Clark County School District (CCSD) must provide an enclosure to secure the central quad area of the school. That’s all. It could be exactly like the enclosures one might see protecting every other CCSD school in the city. But for some reason, such protections are not to be found at MVHS; nor at Virgin Valley High School in Mesquite for that matter.

Both of these rural northeast Clark County high schools were built back in the early 1990s, a time when people didn’t worry as much about such horrors. But over the years, horrific events have caused such concerns to take center stage. Nowadays, every new school in the district is built with locked down safety measures. And over the past decade, those schools that didn’t have such measures were retrofitted to include them. All except the high schools in the northeast rurals. For some reason, our two schools were passed by.

Now the MVCEAB was seeking to see that situation set right, once and for all. The group had done its homework, too. It had actually gotten a bid for the project. The cost to provide these safety precautions to MVHS would come in at a total of $78,210; mere pennies in the $4.9 billion CCSD budget.

In Friday’s meeting, the MVCEAB were making an impassioned pitch to top CCSD officials, asking them to throw those pennies our way to make our schools safer. Unfortunately, as the talk continued, it became clear that no physical barriers were going to be built any time soon. But plenty of bureaucratic barriers were going up against them.

You see, certain measures have to be in place before such a project can be considered, the MVCEAB members were told. An outside specialist must be consulted first and contracted at more than a quarter-million dollars. A full study of the problem must be conducted; not just for our two schools, mind you, but for ALL 360 CCSD schools. Every possible security problem in the district must be assessed and ranked in order of urgency and importance. Only then can it be determined where our local needs should fit into the needs of the whole.

Of course, then the funding must be secured to actually do it. There would need to be the usual political dickering with rural districts in the state over just how much of the state funding earmarked for school safety projects should go to CCSD. And by the way, the help of you parents could sure be beneficial in lobbying at the legislature this year for more education funding… and on and on and on.

All the while, out in the quad, our kids were completely exposed to whatever walks onto campus.
And they continue to be exposed; day in and day out.
Enough talk!

Let’s be clear! Our schools are not trying to skip ahead in line for safety funding. Rather we have been standing in line for more than a decade waiting on these improvements. It is our turn now! You can’t just close the door and make us go back to the end of the line!

We don’t need an expensive assessment to determine that our schools are wide open to unspeakable danger. Just one look out the library window should have sufficed for that.
This is about bringing the rural northeast schools to equity with the rest of the district. It is about our kids being afforded the same basic safety measures as already exist district-wide.

After we are brought up to equity, THEN we can all talk about this long list of safety needs that must be categorized and prioritized. Then let’s hire an expert to do a study and determine just what and where those needs. At that point, we will gladly wait our turn in line for the NEXT generation of safety improvements district-wide; just as we have waited (and are still waiting) for that last generation of improvements to come along.

CCSD central officials must stop making excuses, stop talking around it and do the most fundamentally responsible thing: just lock the doors behind our kids as they enter school. That’s all we are asking! And, for heaven’s sake, please don’t wait for something horrible to happen before it gets done!