Last week, some Moffat County School District parents received emails informing them that their students’ schools had entered some form of security protocol that day. Thankfully, all students and staff were safe, and we pray that continues to be the case every single day.

However, the truth is we live in a world where horrible things happen. That’s the reason, in fact,that the district employs such aggressive security protocols. What’s happened in each of thesecases was schools entering serious security positions in CASE something bad happened,because it seemed possible something bad might happen, even though, ultimately, nothing baddid happen.

It’s the same reason we all lock our doors and use passwords on our emails. We aren’t planning for someone to try to steal from us, but we’re aware someone might, so we take measures to increase the likelihood that nobody does.

MCSD uses a safety protocol from a group called I Love You Guys. This protocol includes statuses like HOLD, SECURE, LOCKDOWN, EVACUATE and SHELTER.

Each status includes procedures intended, based on the best school safety research available, to maximize security and minimize the possibility for harm. We drill these protocols regularly throughout the year, and work hard to ensure that if something were to happen, we’d be ready.

The protocols are intended to work in a way that allows for maximum caution. That is, in the event of a concern, even one that may not be likely to turn into a real problem, triggering the protocols increases safety without unnecessarily impacting learning.

Obviously, the most extreme cases will slow classroom activity down, but in most cases, including HOLD and SECURE, activating the protocols has almost no impact on regular school activity. That means we can activate those protocols at will even if our concern level is relatively low.

Almost every time a protocol is activated, it’s for a low-level concern. Hopefully, and God willing, that will be the case forever.

These concerns include an angry person on or near the school building, a police presence unrelated to the school in the neighborhood, an immediate concern for the safety of a child inside the building, including medical issues, an “elopement,” which refers to a child who has for any period of time seemed to go missing, even if he or she is likely still inside the building, and a handful of other similar concerns. In almost every case, these low level concerns don’t become high-level concerns, and so far, we’ve been fortunate that none of them have become real dangerous situations.

But the tragically unfortunate fact that they could one day become dangerous means we’ll continue to practice these protocols.

We take other measures, too, to protect students, of course. We have video cameras in most parts of every building. We have doors that lock. We have buzz-in entries to get through the initial entry vestibule at all schools, and, as a major future initiative, we are working to add buzzin mechanisms to require secretary-permitted entry to even those internal vestibules.

We recently completed a high-level safety audit by an outside team of school safety experts, and we are working hard to implement all the recommendations they made (though, we’ll proudly note that our teams were complimented on many of their existing procedures and mechanisms).

Nobody is every 100% safe in school or anywhere. That’s the sad truth of the world we live in. But we are working as hard we possibly can to keep our students and staff as safe as we possibly can, even so. Sometimes we’re going to err on the side of being more cautious than necessary. We’ll do that every single time if it means hopefully never being not cautious enough.

Protecting our students is our number one priority. Thank you, Moffat County, for the trust you place in us and the help you give us as we work so hard to do so.