GREENFIELD — Greenfield-Central Schools is inviting community members to a forum on school safety in hopes of informing residents of the district’s security practices and to ease parents’ concerns about students’ well-being.
This public “safety symposium” will take place at 7 p.m. Wednesday in auditorium at Greenfield-Central High School, 810 N. Broadway St., Greenfield.
All community members — not just parents with children in the schools — are invited to attend and ask questions of a panel of local experts, including school officials, police, firefighters and 911 dispatchers.
Lori Katz, the district’s director of secondary curriculum, instruction and assessment, who has planned the forum, warned that officials won’t be able to answer certain questions. The district needs to keep some of its safety plans secret to ensure they aren’t compromised in the event of an emergency.
But families should leave the discussion with a better understanding of what the district’s security procedures are and what updates are planned, Katz said.
The goal of the symposium is to assure the community that safety within Greenfield-Central Schools is a priority, so they’ll answer questions “to the degree they can,” she said.
Talk of school district having an open safety forum began over the summer.
Ashlee Burke, one of a group of Greenfield-Central parents who had earlier in the year asked the district to install metal detectors at each of its buildings, came to the school board meeting in August and asked board members and the administration to consider planning a forum.
A few weeks prior to that school board meeting, Hamilton Southeastern Schools had such a forum in response to the shooting at Noblesville West Middle School, where a teacher and a student were injured by a child who’d brought two handguns and more than 100 rounds of ammunition into the school, according to the The Associated Press.
The young shooter, whose name was never released by investigators because of his age, formally admitted in a hearing this week to the juvenile charges he faces and apologized to the two victims, according to reports.
Hundreds came to Hamilton Southeastern’s safety discussion, Burke told the board in August, and she thought it would be beneficial to have such a program locally.
Superintendent Harold Olin and board president Dan Brown agreed and got to work planning the symposium. Olin said at the time that he hoped the event would “alleviate anxieties” about school security.
Community members who attend next week’s event will be given notecards on which to write their questions, Katz said.
Representatives from the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department, Greenfield Police Department, Greenfield Fire Territory and Hancock County 911 Center are expected to make up the panel of experts at the symposium.
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What: Safety symposium to discuss security at school buildings
When: 7 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Auditorium at Greenfield-Central High School, 810 N. Broadway St., Greenfield.
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