Happy November! We have wrapped up a successful first quarter of the school year, and I have lots of good news to share about the year so far. Our students seem to be more connected to each other and are enjoying school more this year than in the past. I believe the fact that we have cell phones put into pouches during the school day has helped students focus on relationships and schoolwork and just being “present” in school. The end of the quarter was quite fun for our students and staff in each building because of Halloween. I saw many students wearing fun costumes and smiling a lot!
While I do not enjoy the thought of our weather turning cooler, I am pleased to put October into the rearview mirrors. October brought with it some difficult days when it came to school safety and security concerns OUTSIDE of our school buildings.
On October 4th, the explosion of a house put us all on high alert. We entered into a SECURE setting in both the Red Lake secondary and elementary complexes until we could determine the cause of the explosion. For the first few minutes, we did not know whether our schools were at risk because we did not know the cause of the explosion. Once we received word that the explosion was isolated to a single house, we came out of the SECURE setting in our buildings.
Later in the month, on both Friday, October 25th and Monday, October 28th, we were the victim of back-to-back “swatting” incidents. Swatting is defined as the action or practice of making a prank call to emergency services in an attempt to bring about the dispatch of a large number of armed police officers to a particular address. Without warning, we had police officers in tactical gear and weapons coming into our secondary complex because they had been told there was a student with a weapon in the school. Unfortunately, swatting events occur every single day somewhere in our country. This is a sad, but real fact of life in today’s world.
However, because our school district has conducted many drills in order to respond quickly to various situations, we were able to go into SECURE mode very quickly in order to ensure safety during both swatting events. I have heard that some parents were frustrated during our first swatting event because they had to wait about an hour to hear official word on what was happening at the secondary complex. However, during times of potential or real crisis, our first and main priority is keeping our students and staff safe. Only after we have secured the building and understand the situation ourselves can we focus our time and energy on outside communications with parents and guardians. Fortunately, we were able to improve our response time greatly during our second swatting incident the following Monday.
Please know that we will continue to work towards improving our ability to anticipate, prevent, and respond to any crisis situation, including swatting. In fact, we are planning to add a swatting element to our next lockdown drill in a couple of weeks. We will continue to work at becoming better with each drill and each scenario. I ask for your patience and your trust as we move forward. Every day we become better at what we do.
I am looking forward to an enjoyable second quarter of learning and interacting with students as we move into November and December and as the ground turns white with the colder weather. Thank you for your ongoing support of all that we do in our schools.
Tim Lutz