Safety policies and practices a priority as semester launches for Newport-Mesa Unified

As students and teachers returned to classrooms this week, Newport-Mesa Unified School District officials continued to amp up their efforts to ensure campuses are prepared for any emergency.

“This year, we are focusing on working collaboratively to increase student achievement, expand whole-student support, improve communications and community engagement, and strategically address our facilities,” said Supt. Wesley Smith in an email Tuesday.

“Of course, safety is always of paramount importance for school districts,” he said. “We will continue the work of our safety task force this year as we improve our policies, practices and facilities.”

District officials held a number of workshops at four of Newport-Mesa Unified’s high schools over the summer, soliciting ideas and thoughts from community members on how the district could improve safety on campuses for students and teachers.

Earlier this month during a regular meeting of the school board, director of student and community services Sarah Coley and director of risk management Jonathan Wilby gave a report on what came out of a task force formed from those workshops.

“It was a really great opportunity for our communities to come out. We had staff; we had a number of teachers who came out. We had classified staff. We had parents who came out. We had administrators who came out,” Coley said. “It was a really great time for everybody to come. We facilitated an activity to really gather their input under the areas of prevention, response, policy and facilities.”

Informing some of those concerns was the most recent school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two adults were killed by an 18-year-old gunman.

Coley said the school safety task force is comprised of district staff, principals, secondary principals, teachers, classified staff, parents, students, school resource officers and fire marshals. The task force held its first meeting on Aug. 9.

Three more meetings will be held in September, October and November. The focus of the September meeting will be reviewing the information from the August meeting, Coley said.

Wilby described the first meeting as “foundational” to set the expectations of what the task force will set out to accomplish. A focus was the “I Love U Guys” standard response protocols, which Wilby said was piloted in some NMUSD campuses in previous years but was not fully implemented in light of the pandemic.

He said the protocols come down to five actions: hold, secure, lockdown, evacuate and shelter.

“[It’s] creating a consistent language so that you can get people to act on what they need to act on,” Wilby said. “It’s much more nimble than the historical ways of preparing for emergencies, which was identifying every emergency you could possibly have and having step-by-step instructions that the emergency never goes exactly as planned. So, this gives you some ability to adjust based on what happens during the emergency.”

Wilby said the task force will be discussing those protocols further and will implement a districtwide tip line, which is expected to be rolled out this fall.

He also noted that custodians have checked all doors and locks at all the schools prior to the first day of school, a “proactive” move that was undertaken after reading the preliminary investigation released in the Uvalde shooting to confirm whether or not doors, locks and maintenance plans were working. Wilby said the district also built emergency drills and exercises into the compliance checklist for principals.

“The drills that we do are really driven by the [education] code, but this is getting it in front of the principals in one other place. We’ve also built Google folders that the principals will upload the reports from their drills,” said Wilby. “So, now that Google report or that Google folder is shared between the principals and myself so that there’s a little more oversight and communication on the drills between risk management and our school sites.”

Coley said the district will be meeting with school resource officers, who are expected to remain on campuses throughout the first week of classes. A third school resource officer is being added in Costa Mesa. Newport Beach already has three.

“This is kind of ongoing, it’s ongoing work. We know it’s never going to stop, but it’s really been a priority as we’ve gone into the summer and now as we go into the new school year,” said Coley.

Updates on what the task force will be working on will be available to the public at nmusd.us/safety.

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