Danny Thompson sees shades of 1986 in 2004. Eighteen years ago, he says, gangs began marauding in high schools. Recently, the Clark County School District reported a rise in gang affiliation, particularly in junior high.
In 1986, Thompson, then a state assemblyman, pushed for a campus police force—unarmed and undertrained hall monitors were simply too ill-equipped to defy young thugs; CCSD officially created a police department in 1989. Thompson, now the executive secretary-treasurer of the Nevada State AFL-CIO, says the problem persists: Hall monitors are seen as rent-a-cops; they get no respect. He says efforts to empower the district's 275 monitors—training now includes defensive movements, tactical communications, gang-awareness and metal-detection—ignore a fundamental problem: "The hall monitors still have no power, no protection ... We need more cops, bottom line."
Numbers tell his story. The district added 12,637 students and 12 campuses from 2002-03 to 2003-04; school police added eight cops, bringing the number to 146 of 03-04 academic year. Drops in certain crimes (batteries, robberies and incidents involving knives) were offset by increases in others (assaults, burglaries, people cited for possession of controlled substances and gun confiscation—59, up from 54 in 2002-2003). At present, 163 cops are spread across more than 200 schools, watching over 200,000 students.
With no end in sight to the district's breakneck growth, Thompson says campus crime will rise based on simple math: more students equal more potential for problems. Unless school officials hire more cops, he says, they could be courting tragedy.
"Jonesboro, Paducah, Springfield and Littleton: School shootings that are forever etched in our history. We can't let Las Vegas join that list," he says. "If children don't feel safe, they can't learn."
Sponsored by the AFL-CIO and the Clark County School Police Association, "Domestic Terrorism in Our Schools and What We can Do About it" (from 8 a.m. to noon, today at the Cashman Center Theater, 850 Las Vegas Blvd. N) focuses on making students safer. Noted scholar, author and soldier Lt. Col. Dave Grossman will deliver the keynote address. An expert in the field of human aggression and the roots of violence and violent crime, Grossman helped train mental-health professionals after the Jonesboro school shootings. Thompson says landing Grossman was a coup.
Lt. Jim Ketsaa, acting CCSD police chief, piggybacks on Thompson's sentiments. Yes, more stringent training for security monitors isn't a panacea. Yes, the department needs more cops. Yes, he'd like to have a full-fledged department, with higher cop-to-student ratios—maybe not the 1 to 1,000 as prescribed by community standards, but something reasonable. Anything's better than now—a ratio of one cop to roughly 1,200 students. (By comparison, the Los Angeles Unified School District has 335 officers for 900,000-plus students, or about 1 cop for 2,700 students.) The local ratio is likely to grow with enrollment.
"We are competing for the same educational dollars as everyone else—dollars to keep the schools clean, food servers working and bus drivers driving," Ketsaa says. "Only 1 percent of overall school-district budget ($12 million) goes to the school police. I think safety should be a priority."
As for the hall monitor training: "Any other place, you have civilian staff and private firms that do the metal-detecting, and if they find something, they turn it over to law-enforcement. If we had eight officers on campus, four were tied up with metal detecting. That takes cops away from law enforcement work. Cops should be out being proactive. Trained campus security monitors free cops to do police work."
People mistakenly think that Metro handles school crimes, Ketsaa says, and thus haven't supported efforts to hire more school cops. "The sheriff [Bill Young] has said he's not going to do it. It would cost far more to have Metro do it and the CCSD would lose a lot of control. It takes a different person to be a school officer than an officer on the street."
And there simply aren't enough people applying to be school police officers, adds Jeff Hafen, director of support staff training and development for the school district. The intent of the campus security-monitor training, he says, is to get more bang for the taxpayer buck. Before, they monitored classes, broke up fights, retrieved students from classes, did minor patrols. Now the district has upgraded them, given them a pay raise and formalized training. "We have the same problem everyone else does ... like every other agency in United States, we can't hire enough cops."
In the aftermath of the 1998 shooting in the Thurston High School cafeteria in Springfield, Oregon—then 15-year-old Kip Kinkel killed two and injured 25—the town's 11,500-student district revamped its approach to safety, stationing a cop on every campus (there are only 26, as opposed to nearly 300 local schools).
Other changes in Springfield: school site layout and design (minimizing entrances and exits, additional windows in the main offices so that official always have a view of the front side of the school), educational prevention programs such as Second Step, which promotes respect. Two weeks ago, someone left a note in the bathroom threatening to bring in a gun to school on a Friday. Additional cops patrolled the campus.
"The issue still alive though it happened five years ago," says Jeff DeFranco, community relations coordinator for the Springfield School District.
Along with more cops, Ketsaa says, CCSD police could use more technology—better vehicles and communication systems, more in-car computers—a request unlikely to be granted given the district's tight budget.
While Ketsaa is recommending that his officers attend the forum and soak in Grossman's knowledge, there is one slight problem: since it's during school, they'd have to leave their posts.