Oklahoma Safety Bills to Change Little for Schools

The highly touted package of school security bills that have passed the Oklahoma Legislature and now wait only for Gov. Mary Fallin’s likely signature won’t make schools much safer, at least in the short term, school and law enforcement officials said.

The House gave its approval to four bills establishing a Homeland Security division for school safety and directing schools to run intruder drills, report firearms found on campus and share their emergency plans with local emergency responders. The bills were a result of a commission convened by Lt. Gov. Todd Lamb to study the problem after 20 first-graders and six educators were shot and killed in December at an elementary school in Connecticut.

But school officials – whether in the 120-student Cleora Public School in Afton or the 44,000-student Oklahoma City Public Schools – said they have run lockdown drills, shared their plans with police and alerted police when they find guns for years. And they said Oklahoma’s Office of Homeland Security already helps them prepare for emergencies.

Edmond police spokeswoman Jennifer Monroe said security partnerships like the one the department has with Edmond Public Schools work well. “We’ve come up with a plan together. We meet regularly. We fine-tune it,” she said.

The four bills are only slight modifications to current Oklahoma law. The bill relating to sharing emergency plans with law enforcement, for example, simply gives an explicit definition of “local emergency organization,” while the bill relating to firearm reports extends the law to all unauthorized guns, even if the student possessing them is older than 18.

A handful of representatives questioned the bills’ effectiveness before the House vote.

“I have to tell you, this looks like purely a political statement by some political leaders to bang the drum, get some headlines: Here we go for homeland security, for school security,” Rep. Richard Morrissette, D-Oklahoma City, said.

The only bill not directed at school districts would instruct the state Office of Homeland Security to create the Homeland Security School Safety Institute to make training advice and protocols available to school districts and police from one central repository.

Current state law already directs the Homeland Security Office to work with educational institutions and local governments, and the office was providing grants to school districts for security cameras, emergency radios and other safety equipment long before Newtown, school and law enforcement officials said.

Joanna Tuck, a district administrative assistant for Madill Public Schools in southern Oklahoma, said the safety training she and others received through the Homeland Security Office was “excellent.”

“The training I went to was just for our region and the room was packed,” said Tuck, who attended a security seminar in 2011. “It taught us how to evaluate our campus and what other places have done to strengthen school security.”

Chris Tanea, a spokesman for Bartlesville Public Schools, said the district received a grant for emergency radios. School officials there issued two gun-related alerts last year, including one that ended in the arrest of a high school senior who had been accused of plotting to kill students and police.

Homeland Security Office Director Kim Carter said the money for such grants is now gone, with the office’s lifeline of federal grants having dried up. The bill formalizes the office’s school security duties and might change the financial situation by directing vital state money to the office, Carter said.

“It’s a little more broad than what we’ve been able to do in the past,” said Carter, who was also a member of the state school safety commission. “And quite honestly, we hope to get state funding to do the things we need to do.”

Several school officials took a similar position, saying the four security bills were at least a useful starting point for more meaningful school safety initiatives in the future, such as funding for cameras or double doors in schools across the state.

“We’re looking for any way to make schools safer,” said Tim Carson, superintendent of Cleora Public School. “We’re starting now. The more conversation that’s brought up about these tragedies that have happened, maybe we can find out after reviewing this why people do these things.”