LAURINBURG — Student safety was the topic of concern Monday when the the Scotland County School Board met as a committee Monday.
At the monthly Committee of the Whole meeting, in addition to topics like clear backpacks and metal detectors, Scotland High School Principal Brian Edkins spoke on additional measures he wanted to start at the high school.
The board agreed in July that clear bookbags would be implemented in K-12 and metal detectors purchased for the high school for more security measures. Edkins added that, while he wants to continue doing the random days with the metal detector, he’d like to add more measures to it.
“The random metal detector is going well, but we want to take it a step further,” Edkins said. “Right now we do the metal detectors at 7, so if (a student doesn’t) get a text by 7:10 they don’t have any friends — so the one thing we’re talking about is implementing a random search. But you have to be careful that we aren’t violating the Fourth Amendment.”
Edkins explained that a random generator would conduct a list that would have a specific period and teacher on the days the metal detector was not going for all students.
The process is mainly to look for weapons, so Edkins added that another thing they’re wanting to do is to conduct random searches with drug dogs. The process would be much the same with the list being generated randomly. However, for this, the students would be taken to a secure room while leaving their bags in the classroom to allow the dogs to go through.
If the dog smells something on the bag then it would be considered reasonable suspicion — so when the students come back, whoever’s bag signaled the dog they would take to the office and search their bag.
When the K-9 units are in the school an announcement would be made to inform teachers so they keep students in the classroom rather than have them wandering the halls while the dogs are there. Edkins also said that he would leave teachers names on the list even after they’re searched so students wouldn’t think that, since it had been done once, they were safe.
“We could also do random locker searches the same way,” Edkins added. “We could also do the school buses, if the school bus pulls up and that’s the random one picked we just tell the kids ‘everyone leave what you have’ and escort them to a secure area — once they’re cleared from the bus we’d take the dogs on, just like a classroom search.”
The board approved for Edkins to begin the additional searches and he said a letter will go out to parents about the searches and what will be going on.
The board also heard input from Larry Obeda, Scotland County Schools executive director of auxiliary services, on the clear bookbags.
Obeda said the extra safety measure appears to be working as teachers and staff tend to glance into the bags to make sure everything is as it should be. The main goal with the clear bags is to be a deterrent to students from bringing in weapons to school.
Though everyone seemed to be in agreement when Cchair Rick Singletary brought up that the bags aren’t durable, with many students already going through at least one.
Scotland County Schools Public Information Officer Meredith Bounds said since the vote occurred in July of last year there wasn’t much time for Walmart and other suppliers to get the clear backpacks in. Walmart ended up having to work with another supplier to get the bags in on time, but since the board plans on continuing the clear bookbags, there might be an option to talk durability.
“I think if we know this far in advance we can get the numbers that we need,” Bounds said. “But also we could talk to them about getting different price points and maybe durability, but we were very limited this year.”
In other business:
— The board heard from Sharon Castelli, project manager for the BRICK literacy grant, who informed the board that many projects are underway — such as the high schoolers designing and building the little libraries that will go across the county. They are setting up author visits for students which will allow students to meet the author and get a signed copy of the book as well.
— After a presentation by Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources for Scotland County Schools Cory Satterfield the board agreed to hire an immigration lawyer to go to see what the school’s chances are on keeping several of the international teachers who’s J1 visas are expiring within the next two years.
— The board was also able to talk with the robotics teams from the elementary schools and middle schools about their different projects they’ve used to compete in the recent robotics competition held at Carver Middle School.
Reach Katelin Gandee at 910-506-3171 or at [email protected]
