Legislators visit Charles City searching for school security model

By Kate Hayden, khayden@charlescitypress.com

With the next legislative session already in mind, two Iowa House representatives took a trip to Charles City Thursday looking for a model of school security.

Rep. Jim Carlin, R-Sioux City, and Rep. Stan Gustafson, R-Cumming, toured the Charles City Middle School, accompanied by district Superintendent Dan Cox, Buildings and Grounds Manager Jerry Mitchell and communications & community engagement specialist Justin DeVore.

The school district representatives met with Carlin and Gustafson for 20 minutes in a conference room to talk about safety planning and collaboration with local law enforcement, before going on a walking tour of the middle school.

The Charles City school interested the two representatives because it was a new construction that could take active threat situations into account during planning, Carlin said.

“I think you guys have the state-of-the-art, compared to other school districts,” Carlin said at the start of the meeting. “With the shootings that have taken place, we just don’t want to see that happen again.”

Gustafson referenced several terrorism incidents in the U.S. and abroad, and said he was worried about the preparation of Iowa schools to face active threats to students.

“One of the biggest soft targets are schools,” Gustafson said. “It worries me a lot. … I’ve been in some schools, some in my district, and it’s very haphazard in terms of security.”

The Charles City district was able to include new security measures when it built the middle school that aren’t available in other district schools, Cox told the representatives.

District employees are given access to school facilities through an assigned key fob, which is coded depending on a staff member’s need to access school buildings.

In the middle school, swiping the key fob of a staff member with special access can lock down the entire school building, blocking access from the high school and blocking entry to the gymnasium and four grade level learning studios — but it does not block exits to outside grounds.

Local law enforcement and first-responders are immediately called when lock-down is in effect, but the district will also be hosting emergency responders every year to review medical and law enforcement procedures in case of emergency.

“We have gone away from just lock down and stay in place until police come, and adopted the ‘Run-Hide-Fight’ approach instead,” Cox said. “So at least if your learning studio is locked down and you can determine that the threat is here, we can exit out this second way from the learning studio and get to a safe area quickly. But if there’s nothing keeping that person out initially, all of that response time is diminished.”

The gymnasium is also a lock-down area to provide shelter to people who are in the main commons at the time of an emergency.

The representatives became interested in Charles City after meeting with DeVore during the district’s annual lobbying visit to the capitol in January, Carlin told the Press.

“We’re kind of on a fact-finding tour of the state to get some ideas and make some suggestions to school districts. Not all the school districts in Iowa have an active shooter protocol in place presently,” Carlin said.

The two representatives have not yet visited many schools in the state, Carlin said, but hope to use the visits to shape a new bill when the House reconvenes for a legislative session in January. The “vast majority” of Iowa schools seem to have plans in place, he added, but after inquiring, Carlin and Gustafson found some schools did not have plans.

“We would like to mandate that you have a plan,” Carlin said. “The idea is to mandate that they have those bases covered — not how you do, but that you do have a protocol in place, that there is training of teachers and staff, and that there’s a strategy if something like that ever did come up.”

Regarding the Charles City Middle School, “It’s very well thought-out,” Carlin said.

“It keeps people out, but it allows people to leave. It’s coordinated with law enforcement, law enforcement know the lay of the land, so to speak. They know how it works.”

Carlin said he started to consider the issue last summer before he was elected. A bill was brought into committee during this legislative session, but needed more time in the process, Carlin said. Carlin and Gustafson will be visiting the Norwalk Community School District next.

“The safety of school children should be a priority, and the realities of today’s world require us to embrace that responsibility to make sure that we have what we need to protect our kids,” Carlin said.