On the morning of Jan. 23, Marshall County Schools Superintendent Trent Lovett (right) dropped his daughter off at the high school and then drove to his office at the nearby district office. Before he even sat down, the high school principal called.
“I’ve got one down,” she told Lovett.
“I thought a teacher had a heart attack,” Lovett said during his keynote speech at the Safe Schools Coordinators Symposium Sept. 26 at Eastern Kentucky University. “And she said, ‘and maybe more.’ When she said that, I knew it wasn’t good.”
Two 15-year-old students – Bailey Holt and Preston Cope – died that day after another 15-year-old student brought a gun to school and began shooting. Fourteen other students were shot and several more injured trying to escape. Lovett’s daughter was not injured, but she was standing next to a classmate who was shot in the stomach.
When Lovett walked into the school’s commons area minutes after the shooting, it was a scene of chaos that was eerily silent.
After the shooting
After police arrested the suspect, Lovett and his staff faced the aftermath of what occurred. “I think, ‘OK, what do we have to do next?’” he said.
Karen McCuiston, director of the resource center for the Kentucky Center for School Safety, was quickly on site and “thought of so many things that we wouldn’t have thought of.”
McCuiston worked for McCracken County Schools when the district’s Heath High School had a school shooting in 1997.
She brought a list of things for Marshall County to consider in response to the shooting, including suggestions of hiring an outside janitorial service to clean up the crime scene, holding after school counseling sessions and taking the district’s website and social media off line.
Lovett reached out to several people across the country who had dealt with school shootings, and several reached out to Marshall County. One question Lovett asked was when the district should return to school?
“Some of them told us, ‘we went back the next day and that was way too quick.’ Some of them said ‘we waited a week and that was way too long,’” he said.
Marshall County decided to cancel classes district-wide for the day after the shooting and at the high school for two days. On Jan. 26, three days after the shooting, high school students returned to school with their parents and “the healing process started,” he said. “Very little classwork went on that day, as you can imagine. But probably a lot of learning.”
Safety changes
Lovett asked the students what changes they wanted the school to make to feel safe. Bag checks and metal detector wands were two things the students asked to be implemented. Those two security measures also allowed staff to have two opportunities to have personal communication with every student each morning, he said.
“There was some healing that went on for all of us through that process,” Lovett said.
The high school also added door and hallway monitors, parking lot security and additional counselors.
By the end of the school year, Lovett said he, the district’s administrators and teachers were physically, emotionally and mentally drained, and he knew they couldn’t continue at that pace.
The district hired additional mental health counselors and four additional school resource officers for the 2018-19 school year. They also purchased walk through metal detectors and banned backpacks at the high school and middle schools. Elementary students can only use clear backpacks.
Lovett said some of the changes “are a little bit of window dressing, but we had to do something in our community.
“If somebody wants to do this, none of this is going to stop them. I wish I could say this is the magic wand that works. When they get to that state of mind, they don’t care. Now, does this make our kids feel safer? Yes. Is this the end all, be all? No.”
Lovett advises districts to maintain records that they adopted emergency response plans and practiced safety drills. The district received an open records request from an attorney for several documents, including the emergency response plan and records of safety drills for the past five years along with a request for the school’s evacuation routes. Lovett said the evacuation routes are something districts do not have to release.
Lovett also received emails and text messages from superintendents and others throughout the state.
“There were counties I didn’t even know we had that responded,” he said. “I appreciate it so much and I certainly hope I never have to repay it.”
Winter Symposium speakerTrent Lovett will be the Plenary Session speaker at the 2018 Winter Symposium Dec. 1 in Louisville. Registration for this year's Winter Symposium is now open on our
website.
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