Fairfax County, Virginia, parents, community and school board members are calling for extra security and school resource officers, after a stabbing at West Potomac High School on Wednesday sent a student to the hospital.
In a joint statement, Board Members Mateo Dunne, Ilryong Moon and Ryan McElveen said the school system should increase the number of security assistants and make its new weapons detection system program permanent.
Dunne said the program “should never have been a pilot in the first place because that technology is used by the Secret Service every day to protect the president. If it’s good enough for Secret Service, it should have been good enough for FCPS to deploy across the school system from Day One.”
The calls for increased security came after Fairfax County police said a fight in the West Potomac High hallway escalated, and one student stabbed another.
The teenage suspect was arrested, and in a news release Thursday, officials said the victim had stab wounds to the upper body and is stable at the hospital.
The student accused of the stabbing has been charged with malicious wounding, police said.
Days before the stabbing, Fairfax County started deploying 15 OpenGate devices to randomly selected secondary or high schools. At least one school per week will be randomly selected, the district said, and the devices could remain at one school for several days.
Dunne said the devices should be on every school campus. They weren’t at West Potomac on Wednesday, but a school system spokeswoman said they were being used there Thursday.
“There’s nothing more important than the safety and security of our students,” Dunne said. “Certainly in a $4 billion budget, we can find funding to pay for this. We need it every day at every school, not just random high schools every other day.”
Superintendent Michelle Reid, though, said the goal of the pilot is to determine whether the technology is effective and learn the number of staff members who have to be involved.
“It’s not really the equipment that is the concern, it’s the number of staff required to support that equipment at each site,” Reid said.
The board members also called for extra unarmed security officers, and for larger schools to have more school resource officers. The recommendation for school resource officers is one per 1,000 students, Dunne said, but at West Potomac, there’s one officer assigned for 3,000 kids.
“When I speak to principals, they say there just aren’t enough to deal with the range of postpandemic student misconduct that happens on an everyday basis, and so that’s why many students don’t feel safe to use the bathrooms,” Dunne said. “They don’t feel safe going to certain parts of the school building.“
While waiting for their students Wednesday afternoon, some parents expressed frustration at the amount of time it took for them to learn about what had happened. Bill Beal said he was notified 45 minutes after the incident, and his daughter was eager to leave the school campus.
But Beal said even though the school wasn’t on lockdown status, he was told he couldn’t pick his daughter up.
Another parent, Aellene, received a video recording of the stabbing and wondered, “Where’s the teachers when this was happening? Clearly this is something that could have been stopped,” she said.
Addressing the parents’ frustration, Reid said the Fairfax County police homicide unit took over the crime scene, and “it was a real crime scene in the moment.”
Reid said she’s proud of the way school staff handled the stabbing, and county leaders will review video footage and notes and make improvements as needed.
“There isn’t going to be one single strategy that’s really going to effectively eliminate school violence,” Reid said. “And I also want to note that, to be fair, our schools are really a mirror of our community in terms of the violence escalation that’s occurred in our community, both in the number of weapons in our community, the number of fights in our community.”
The school division will review its response to the incident, Reid said, and there is extra security and counselors on campus at West Potomac to support students.
“It would be wise for our community, and perhaps our country, to come together and really have a frank discussion about how we resolve conflict, and that violence isn’t always the default and shouldn’t be,” Reid said.
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