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Field Experience D: Identifying Safety-Related Issues

Mary McVey

College of Education, Grand Canyon University

EAD-505: Education Law

Dr. Shelly Arneson

December 2, 2020
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Areas of Concern

After exploring the campus with our school safety officer and head of grounds, I was able

to conduct a thorough audit of our school’s overall safety. While we are highly regarded in the

community for being one of the safest schools in our area, there are still some areas of concern.

These areas that need immediate attention as they pose potential safety risks to our school

population include the lack of student health services, the isolation of the portable classrooms,

and the non-covered windows in every classroom on the main campus.

The first issue is that we are overall lacking in the services we provide for our students’

mental and physical health. We do not have school nurses or other medical personnel on campus,

so we have no active way of monitoring or responding to a health incident immediately. We do

have one athletic director that is certified in sports health, but they are not on campus 24/7 and

are honestly not the most-equipped person for that job. According to research, “studies show that

students in schools with a school nurse perform better academically, as well,” and we are

depriving our students of these many valuable benefits by not having a school nurse (Aftunion,

2016). Additionally, while we do have two social/emotional counselors on staff, they are

overworked and unable to accommodate the rising number of students in need of mental health

checks. We often have to utilize the resources of the larger, public high school across the street.

However, many of our students do not feel comfortable approaching our services and would

rather deal with their problems on their own. This is an extreme safety concern as our students

need adequate, immediate help through accessible students, and we are failing them.

We are also exposing our students to potentially dangerous situations by not upgrading

our portable classrooms to modern standards. The area around these portables are not well-lit, are

isolated from the main part of campus, and are about a five-minute walk from the main office,
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which is dangerous in itself in case of an emergency. We also discovered during our audit that

the intercom system in each portable does not work properly. The fire, earthquake, and lockdown

emergency sirens also do not play through the intercoms in the portables. Last year, during a

drill, the students and teacher in the portable classrooms did not come out as they were not even

aware of any drill occurring.

The last area of concern is the number of classrooms with large windows. Almost every

classroom that is heavily populated during the day, have large floor-to-ceiling windows covering

an entire wall. While these windows are great for lighting and monitoring what is happening

inside each room, they are hazardous when it comes to a possible shooter situation. Every year,

local law enforcement provides a complimentary safety audit of our school and this is one of the

areas of concern that they always highlight. They are worried by the size of the windows, the fact

that they cannot be covered, and that they are easy to break through. Since the windows are so

large and cover an entire wall, it is also impossible for students to hide from someone looking in.

I have often had nightmares where my students are exposed to an active shooter because the

windows give away our position immediately.

Ideas/Solutions

Each possible solution to our school’s immediate cause for concern can be easily

addressed and corrected, however, they each require a substantial amount of money. The

quickest solution to all three is to apply for a safety grant. These types of grants award certain

companies that provide money to schools that need to update systems or building in order to

provide a safer campus for everyone. While these grant opportunities are often plentiful and

award hefty sums, we are unfortunately ineligible to apply for many of them because we are a

religiously affiliated school. Also, grant writing takes time and practice and are not always a
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guaranteed solution. Instead, I believe the best solution would be a series of steps including:

hiring one additional student health staff member, upgrading the intercoms in the portables, and

installing window coverings in each classroom.

Our first step would be to hire a staff member dedicated solely to the health of our

students. I believe that having a nurse on campus during school hours will be the most effective

way to address this safety concern. We also do not need to pay for one, as many of our current

parents are trained nurses and are often in need of ways to fulfill their service hours obligations

to the school. We could have multiple volunteer nurses taking different shifts throughout the day,

so that we always have a health professional available. At this moment, we are unable to hire an

additional social/emotional counselor, but I propose that the current counselors are removed

from any committees they serve on that do not directly tie in with their jobs. For example, one of

the counselors is also responsible for managing our student government. This adds time and

stress to her job and takes away from her main duties to serve the mental health of our students.

There are plenty of other staff members that can assume this student government leadership

position, so that our counselors are awarded more opportunities to be dedicated to their main

responsibilities.

Lastly, we need to install some sort of simple window coverings in each classroom. Our

large windows are an extreme safety concern, but can be fixed easily with the immediate

installation of blinds. Specifically, we would need to install modern blinds that are controlled

electronically at the teacher’s desk and not with cords, in order to “mitigate the risks of child

strangulation, window-blind related injuries, and other risks of facing accidents” (Zebrablinds,

2019). We can also work with local blind and window treatment companies to find low-cost

options. We could also start a fundraising campaign for school safety and use our status as a non-
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profit to apply for special funding opportunities to make all of these solutions an immediate

reality.

Concerns Related to School Vision and Mission

Our school mission and philosophy, established in the founding year of our school of

1964, does not state safety as a primary concern at all. In fact, the word in not mentioned once in

either our outlined mission, vision, and message from the principal. Our mission instead focuses

on our promise to prepare “prepares young women ‘to be all of which woman is capable’” and

our philosophy states how our school is committed to provide “opportunities to further enhance

the moral, cultural, spiritual and intellectual development of each student” (Saint Joseph High

School, 2020). While this exclusion of safety might seem like a gross oversight and violation of

our responsibility to keep our school community, I believe it is at least implied in our school’s

promises and met daily. Just because safety is not explicitly expressed in our mission, it is a

major part of our student, parent, and faculty handbooks and an important part of our yearly

training. Even though there is no trained medical professional on campus, all staff members are

certified in CPR and first aid. While the portables are not up-to-date on safety standards, they

have thankfully not been used for years. The windows, while still a concern, are not seen as a

violation of our promise of safety as we have many other safety procedures put in place to stop

an active shooter before they even get close to a classroom. However, Saint Joseph High School

needs to do a better job addressing these areas of concern to keep their promise to give young

women a place to learn and become the next generation of leaders, and this cannot be done in an

unsafe environment.
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Mentor’s Perspective on Problems/Solutions

My mentor, Elaine Borgonia, the Dean of Faculty, agreed with my overall assessment,

but is skeptical of my possible solutions. She has worked at this school for almost 20 years and

was a student here before that. She knows this campus inside and out and has been acutely aware

and vocal about its safety concerns for some time. Before even analyzing the safety audit

checklist, she correctly guessed the areas where improvement is needed. Specifically, she

focused on the dangerous isolation of the portable classrooms and of the possible safety concerns

of the school’s many, giant windows. As a teacher herself, she often prayers every year not to be

assigned of the portable classrooms. She feels that they are dark, cold, and not adequality

equipped. They have outdated technology, do not have viable communication systems, and are

often ignored or forgotten by the rest of the school population. She fears that some nefarious or

unfortunate circumstances could have taken place there without anyone even noticing. Since

overall enrollment has declined since the recession in 2008, she says that these classrooms are

luckily not needed much anymore. However, she is still wary of every using them again until

they are properly updated.

Additionally, she discussed her concern over the large windows. She repeated many of

the items discussed in the first section of this paper, but she went on to explain the original

intention of their design. While I incorrectly assumed that these windows were designed merely

for aesthetic purposes, they did have good safety intentions when they were installed in the late

60s to early 70s. They do in fact provide great lighting and beautiful views of the trees and field

on campus, however they were intended for much more than that. My mentor explained that at

the time of their origin, school shootings were not a concern at all. There were no lock-down,

active shooter drills, and nobody even considered these large windows to be dangerous. At the
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time, the bigger concern was to provide access to looking into the classrooms at all time to

ensure that teachers were behaving appropriately and that students were never in an area where

they can go unsupervised. However, she sees how they are more of a liability than an asset to the

school now.

While my mentor found my solutions to be carefully crafted and overall viable, she is too

pessimistic at this point in her career to believe that they will actually be implemented. She

stated that these areas of concern have existed for years and have often been addressed to no

avail. She does not believe that we will ever receive the proper funding to improve the windows

and the portable buildings. However, she does think that volunteer parent nurses can work since

there would be no large financial requirement on our end. Her solution to the other problems

discussed is less about fixing, and more about simply eliminating. She proposed to just have the

portables removed, so that the school is never tempted to use them again. She also thinks that

active shooters on campuses are going down and that the windows will not need to be addresses

after all. While I appreciate her expertise and advice, I disagree with her main arguments. Our

current leadership teams are set to retire soon, and I am hopeful that our new principal and vice-

principals will usher in a new area of change and upgrades, starting with the areas of concern I

have addressed.

Reflection/Implications for Future Practice

Good leaders “build and maintain a safe, caring, and healthy school environment that

meets that the academic, social, emotional, and physical needs of each student,” daily and to the

best of their ability. (National Policy Board for Educational Administration, 2015). The first sub-

section of Standard 5, this statement is a promise from all educational leaders to everyone that

sets foot on their campus to establish and maintain a safe environment. It is our duty as
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administration to allow our staff and students to conduct their daily lessons in a comfortable

environment, without fear of violence or other safety issues. Since my career goal is to one day

be an administrator at the high school I teach at, completing this safety audit is a tremendous

asset to my strengths. I now have a much better understanding of the layout of the campus and

all the areas that need attention and immediate or long-term improvement. When I become

someone in charge of decision-making, I will have the experience in this area to make a well-

educated choice that align with proper safety standards. I will also make it my goal as a future

leader to address the areas I discussed in this paper, if they have not been resolved by that time. I

will also actively try to keep myself motivated and learn from my mentor’s current pessimism

toward change, instead of succumbing to it like many long-term teachers. While I am still in awe

of my mentor’s illustrious career and continued motivation for education, I am now more aware

of how easy it is for anyone to fall victim to pessimism, fear of change, and general

complacency. Besides learning more practical safety techniques and improvements for our

school, I was also inadvertently reminded of my duty as a future school administrator to stay

motivated and positive for all those I will lead.

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References

Aftunion. (2016, August 03). Every child needs a school nurse. Retrieved December 03, 2020,

from https://www.aft.org/childrens-health-safety-and-well-being/childrens-access-

care/every-child-needs-school

ESSEX, N. L. (2019). SCHOOL LAW AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS: A practical guide for

educational leaders. PEARSON.

National Policy Board for Educational Administration. (2015). Professional Standards for

Educational Leaders [PDF]. Reston, VA.

Saint Joseph High School. (2020). Mission and Philosophy. Retrieved December 03, 2020, from

https://sj-jester.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=407559

Zebrablinds. (2019, September 12). Best Window Treatments for Schools and Universities.

Retrieved December 03, 2020, from https://www.zebrablinds.com/blog/window-

treatments-for-schools-and-universities-9-2019-37/