Safe school culture

Dear Escalante Middle School Community,

Since the recent school shooting in Florida, it feels like our entire country is searching for answers to ensure that we never experience that gut wrenching feeling that it can happen again. Political commentary offering a wide range of solutions dominates news headlines and social media feeds. Many students across the country are actively protesting, demanding that their hallways are kept safe. Sadly, since the Parkland shooting there have also been dozens of threats made to schools across the country. These threats are spread quickly across snapchat, and it is not uncommon for a student to read a threat on their snapchat account that was made in a different time zone. As a result, the specter of school violence is at the front of parents, students and educators collective consciousness.

At Escalante, we have a full-time security guard and a school resource officer dedicated to ensuring we have a secure campus. In addition, our new door entry system allows us to keep all doors locked at all times. Perhaps the most important security measure that we have is our students themselves. It is important that every student understands very clearly that if they notice something that is not safe, they need to report it to a teacher, a parent, or the office staff. As noise about threats made in distant schools reaches our students social media feeds, they have been very quick to relate those posts to me so that I can refer them to law enforcement. I have great appreciation for these reports.

If your child has a Snapchat account, please be aware that a great deal of discourse about gun violence is being passed from feed to feed across schools. While it is often not credible information, they still need to report anything that could put students at risk. I urge parents to increase supervision or suspend your child’s social media accounts as well. It is a time when increased communication with parents is very important for our kids right now, and I cringe at the thought that social media may be the main source of information for any child right now.

On a much more traditional and comfortable topic, we will be printing progress reports and sending them home with students Tuesday. Please review your students grades with them and help them set some action plans for when quarterly grades are printed before Spring Break.

Thank you for helping us guide our school community to ensure our students have the safe and warm school culture that they each deserve.

Sincerely,

Jeremy Voss
EMS, Principal

Published March 2, 2018 Print