In The News: Newberg gets high marks on school security audit

Written by: Seth Gordon, Newberg Graphic 

District does not have any 'high-level' threats, focuses on integrating safety training into its systems

Partly in response to a thwarted plan by former students to shoot up Newberg High School in March, the school district hired a consultant to perform a district-wide safety and security last spring.

New Dawn Security founder Sean Spellacy, a former teacher and principal, told the school board at its Oct. 11 meeting that the district has done an excellent job in creating safe and secure school and briefed them on the ongoing work administrators are now doing to further mitigate its risks moving forward.

“I have been absolutely impressed by what you have in place so far,” Spellacy said. “I have gone to every school, inside and out, and at this point I will tell you absolutely that there is not one high-level risk that I have seen.”

Soon after being hired, Spellacy led a two-day assessment of the high school. The main results of that process were adding a system that locks all entry doors during class, but allows students and staff to access them with their ID badges. All visitors must also enter the building through one of two entrances and be buzzed in by the main office through the same video monitoring system that all other district schools had already been employing.

“We needed somebody who could look at our schools from a different perspective,” assistant superintendent Dave Parker said. “We’ve worked closely with Newberg police, so we’ve had the police perspective coming in and looking at our buildings and our security, but having somebody who’s working with other districts and knows what other districts are doing and the struggles they’re having, it’s a new lens that we have to work with.”

Spellacy gave the board a broad overview of the system-wide audit, focusing on the crisis and emergency protocols and training that he and district staff are working to develop and install.

The central component of the work moving forward is creating what Spellacy refers to as a living, breathing safety and security manual, which includes creating the response protocols for school administrators and crisis response teams that are maintained on shared online documents.

To be truly successful, though, any plans and procedures must be implemented by everyone connected to the school.

“Gone are the days where safety and security are an administrator’s primary job,” Spellacy said. “It has to be faculty, staff, students, their parents. In order to create what I know you want, it’s going to take work from everybody.”

Spellacy and administrators will also develop preventative measures to improve physical and operational safety, but furthermore, they will have to figure out how the district can make training both ongoing and built into yearly schedules so that the end product is a sustainable system.

“If we talk about this once at the beginning of the year, they’re going to forget about it by October,” Spellacy said. “Being able to create some of this in a sustained way but not in a lot of time will help increase safety and security throughout the entire school year.”

Parker said there is no specific timeline for developing and implementing new or additional safety measures, but does see an end line and believes district staff and Spellacy have been working well together so far.

The final part of the manual is establishing a way to monitor the effectiveness of the protocols and preventative measures, which will allow it to continually evolve.

Altogether, Spellacy believes the end product for the school district will be quite unique.

“This is what I’m really excited about because I promise you there’s not one other district in the state of Oregon doing this right now with the living, breathing safety-security manual on Google docs,” Speallacy told the board. “Once we get it built, it will be a really neat thing to walk through.”