Green Bay Area Public School District building. (IMAGE: Courtesy of Fox 11 WLUK)
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Green Bay’s school board will start discussing next steps to beef up safety in schools at its meeting Monday night.
All options are said to be on the table about one month after a loaded gun was found in a student’s backpack at Preble High School after fights on Sept. 9.
Green Bay high school and middle school students are entering their fourth week of clear backpacks and ramped up consequences for unsafe behavior at school.
“Entrance into the school is back to what it typically had been, but now staff have the ability to look at bags as needed,” said Vicki Bayer, superintendent of the Green Bay Area Public School District.
Those two changes were just the initial response to the gun being found.
The following week, about 500 people participated in roundtable discussions at Preble on what else could be done to improve safety.
The school board is now set to review the community’s recommendations for potential implementation.
Bayer says the community’s top suggestions include dress code changes and closing campus for lunch.
“This year we have closed campus for freshmen and we’ve already seen positive results in attendance as a result of that,” said Bayer.
Stronger mental support was another top theme.
“Mental health is a really tough one because we don’t have the providers in the state of Wisconsin that could sufficiently meet the needs of all our students,” said Bayer.
Other top recommendations were stronger relationships with students and increasing school resource officers from the current 11 for the district’s 40 school buildings.
“SRO expense would be somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000 per SRO,” said Bayer.
And perhaps the top community suggestion for improving school safety: adding weapons detection systems.
“Doing it the right way would require an increase in our staffing for sure and the cost of course of the material,” said Bayer.
The district has already been looking at the cost. On the high-end, it estimates adding non-invasive weapon detection systems at the middle and high schools would cost the district about $1.5 million per year.
“The most expensive model would be having numerous lanes, maybe up to four lanes at each of the larger schools,” said Bayer. “These would have to be staffed by minimally two, maybe three staff members per lane.”
Bayer says the potential price comes as the district is trying to eliminate a $4 million budget deficit for this school year.
“We have to continue to look at everything,” said Bayer. “Our most expensive item is staffing. So, we’ll continue to look at opportunity through attrition and retirement for not back filling positions.”
Bayer says eliminating positions through attrition will likely need to be coupled with other measures to eliminate the deficit.
Asking voters to support a referendum is an option for increased safety costs, but Bayer says that could be tricky depending on how quickly the board wants implementation.
“We’re really looking for more feedback from the board. None of these measures will 100% guarantee that we won’t have an unsafe incident again. Anything we can do to enhance our existing safety and security measures is what we’re looking for.”
There isn’t a timeline for implementation, as it depends which options the board wants to pursue.
Superintendent Bayer says the board could decide it wants more research on a certain option and could also decide it needs more community feedback before making a decision.
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