The Evanston/Skokie School District 65 Board of Education unanimously voted on Wednesday, July 13, to create several new district-wide jobs designed to improve building safety and security at all schools.
The vote, held at a special morning meeting at the Joseph E. Hill Early Childhood Center, calls for hiring to fill new positions, including 16 concierges who will work at the main entrance to individual school buildings, check in visitors and monitor any people who move and off the school campus.
In addition, these gatekeepers will report to the manager and deputy manager of prevention and special response, two more new positions for which the district is already interviewing candidates for the time being, Deputy Superintendent of Operations Terrance Little said Wednesday.
The special prevention and response manager and assistant manager will have police or military training and will lead any district response to crisis situations, such as an intruder or an active shooter, Little and Superintendent Devon Horton said.
The special response team will also provide “direct daily safety measures for the superintendent and board of education members,” according to job listings on the district’s website.
At the moment, individual schools don’t have someone on staff whose main job is to check doors, monitor entrances and conduct tours inside and outside the building, according to Little. As a result, the district needs to invest more time and resources in proactive safety precautions, he said.
“I can honestly say that we are not in a preventative situation. ‘Insurance’ and ‘prevention’ are two different things,” said Little. “We’re not being preemptive because we’re in a great environment and a great place, but it’s like Highland Park: anything can happen.”
The district is also in talks with several software companies to release new technology that tracks students’ locations throughout the day and allows faculty, staff and administrators to communicate about emergencies more easily, according to Little’s presentation to members. of the board and a memo posted online with the agenda for the meeting. These companies include Navigate360, Smart Tag, Hall Pass, and Centegix.
Navigate360 will help the district assemble an archive of up-to-date photos that show every inch of each building so police know where to go and how to get into a building in a crisis, Little said, while Smart Tag will allow parents and drivers to by bus to monitor your students on their way to and from school each day. Elementary students will have a Smart Tag card that they can scan when boarding the bus, telling the driver who they are and where they should be dropped off.
High school students will have a real photo ID card through the Smart Tag, and parents will also be able to log into the Smart Tag app to track the bus their children travel to and from school. Meanwhile, concierges at each building will use the Hall Pass program to check visitors into the school and provide a photo badge for them to use during their visit.
Centegix, on the other hand, would provide cards to each teacher equipped with a button they can press to alert central office to a crisis. If the teacher presses the button three times in a row, it would signal the need for an immediate building lockdown, according to Little.
Board members expressed support for the company’s new positions and most partnerships, but several representatives discussed some concerns about collecting data on young children and the risks of normalizing emergency situations by implementing so many different safety requirements.
“For a teacher to use a button that normalizes the expectation of a crisis like a gunshot is very difficult for a human. … We have a system in place for staff to use in every room in every building to make an announcement like, ‘Everyone needs to get out, everyone needs to protect themselves, everyone needs to do something,'” said Joey Hailpern, member of the advice. “We don’t need a new system for that. We need to train people on a tool that already exists like a phone line.”
Chairman of the board Sergio Hernandez said he agrees with Hailpern, and the board has decided to hold off discussion of the Centegix programs for now. As a result, the district has fully approved concierge and special service positions, as well as partnerships with Hall Pass, Smart Tag and Navigate360.
Hernandez and board member Biz Lindsay-Ryan also encouraged the district to prioritize coordinating all these services together so that all information is available in one place and staff can communicate about an issue that needs to be resolved.
The district also removed police officers from school buildings on the board’s recommendation several years ago due to reports of disproportionate police interactions and discipline from black and brown students, so Lindsay-Ryan urged district administrators to be vigilant in hiring a special response team. . who is trained in racial equity and shows a willingness to break traditional law enforcement and military behavior.
Fund new security programs
Going into Wednesday’s meeting, a big question still up in the air was how the district planned to pay for these new technology positions and programs, which Hailpern asked about during the discussion.
According to Horton, the district will fund the security measures and pay the salaries of new employees, reducing private security costs and bringing replacement teacher training and in-house integration. From July 2021 to June 2022, after reporting multiple racist emails and voicemails, Horton received armed “executive protection” from private security guards hired by Phoenix Security.
The superintendent’s personal security cost the district about $500,000 last year, according to invoices obtained by RoundTable, and Horton will no longer use that security, he said Wednesday.
Three years ago, the board voted to outsource substitute teachers through an educational staffing and recruiting company called ESS, which former assistant superintendent of human resources Beatrice Davis said would be “cost-neutral.” But the district can now save about $1 million annually by recruiting and training its own pool of substitute teachers, Horton said at the Wednesday meeting.
Horton did not immediately respond to a Roundtable question about how much all these programs will collectively cost and where the money will come from in the district’s annual budget. The Roundtable also asked how exactly the district’s internal substitute education plan will reduce $1 million in overhead costs per year.
Ultimately, the district plans to gradually implement security measures over the next two to three years, according to Little. The Gatekeepers, Manager and Assistant Manager of Special Prevention and Response, and the Hall Pass program will likely be incorporated into daily school activities as soon as possible.
“It feels like we’re talking to emergency planning and the ordinance is kind of hardening the school’s perimeters, creating a boundary or a force field when something happens. But where do we need to harden and where do we need to soften?” Board member Soo La Kim asked. “We don’t want the burden of hardening to fall on our educators, our students, or our families.”
