By VERNON ROBISON
The Progress
After more than four years of seeking capital funding from Clark County School District (CCSD) for needed school security measures, the Moapa Valley High School has used on-site funding to make the updates on its own. Last week, a contractor crew completed a new security wall across the front entrance to the central quad area of the school.
According to MVHS Principal Hal Mortensen, this completes the first phase of a series of security updates that were identified in an informal Metro Police Dept. assessment back in 2018.
Also included in the first phase were a series of chain link fences along the north side of the school to enclose the outdoor areas between the three school corridors. This portion was completed last summer.
“Of course, there is still a lot to do to complete all of the security updates that were identified at the school,” Mortensen said. “But I am feeling better that we are making progress toward them. My number 1 job is to have our staff, students and the community feel safe at school. It is a long road, but we are getting there.”
The new security wall includes a series of heavy doors that are locked from the outside. Each door is equipped with a crash bar on the inside allowing easy exit from the within.
“This makes it so that anyone entering at the front of the school has to check in through the front office,” said Mortensen. “But if there is an emergency on the inside, people can still leave through those security doors at any time.”
CCSD Resource Officer James Lescinsky, who serves the Moapa Valley schools, said that the security wall is a comforting addition to the school in preventing all kinds of possible crimes on campus.
“Students shouldn’t have to worry about their physical safety while they are on campus,” Lescinsky said. “These gates will not only deter non-students from coming onto campus, it will also be an additional security measure to prevent the possibility of vandalism and theft.”
The push for the added security measures began in 2018 at the Moapa Valley Community Education Advisory Board (MVCEAB).
“We had several incidents that occurred in 2017 and 2018 that raised concern that our high school had been viewed as a target by dangerous people,” said Moapa resident Shari Lyman, who was MVCEAB President at that time. “So we were mainly concerned with threats from the outside walking onto campus and causing trouble. We started a campaign to increase security at the high school, at least to the level of what it is in other CCSD high schools.”
The MVCEAB made a request to local Metro officials that a security assessment be done on the 30-year-old high school facility in the case of a modern single shooter incident. The assessment came back with several weak points found at the school and a list of recommendations on how to beef up security at the facility.
The MVHS School Organizational Team (SOT) then took those recommendations to a contractor for an estimate on the cost of the updates. The estimate, at that time, came back at around $78,000.
The SOT then made a request to CCSD for capital funding to be used to make the improvements.
“There was an awful lot of talk and we spent a lot of time travelling to Las Vegas presented in different meetings,” Lyman recalled. “The district bounced us around and told us we would be put on this list or that list. But in the end it became abundantly clear that they really weren’t going to help us out at all.”
Earlier this year, the SOT approved site-based school funds to go ahead and make the updates.
“In the end, we were told that if the security updates were going to be made, we would have to fund them ourselves,” Mortensen said. “So we used the school’s budget for student achievement and instruction to do these things. We felt that the safety of our kids was that important.”
Mortensen said that, in the past week, he had already heard from some members of the community with complaints that the changes make the school look too much like a prison.
“I understand that it changes the look of the school and that is sad to see,” Mortensen said. “But we are talking about the safety of our kids. And that is just the kind of world we live in nowadays.”
