No off-campus lunch, more police: Seattle schools consider safety changes amid gun violence concerns

Seattle school leaders plan to improve safety and security for next school year, following the Garfield High School shooting that left one person dead and shook the community.

District officials are considering measures such as increasing police and security presence and closing high school campuses at lunchtime.

Marni Campbell, the district’s chief operating officer, said the district’s top priority is for students to feel safe, both inside and outside of school.

“This feeling of security is fundamentally essential to their development,” she said. “If they don’t feel safe, if they feel a state of alarm or a heightened state of anxiety, they don’t thrive.”

Campbell said the district will also pursue new community partnerships, beyond existing collaborations with the city and police department, to combat youth gun violence.

“We all have to work together,” she said. “We’re not just responsible for the part of a student’s brain that lives during that six-hour school day.”

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The new initiative, what Campbell calls “Safe and Caring Schools 2.0,” comes as another school year marked by gun violence in the community comes to an end.

Last fall, as the one-year anniversary of the deadly Ingraham High School shooting approached, a series of assaults in Ballard and North Seattle targeted students as they walked home from school. Some of the student victims said they were held at gunpoint or beaten while the suspects demanded their cellphones and AirPods.

In January, Mobarak Adam, a 15-year-old student at Chief Sealth International High School, became Seattle’s first homicide victim of 2024. He was shot and killed in the bathroom of the Southwest Teen Life Center, less than 500 people away. feet from his West Seattle neighborhood. school.

On June 6, Garfield student Amarr Murphy-Paine, 17, died after being shot multiple times in the chest and abdomen. He was trying to break up a fight in a school parking lot during lunch. As of Friday, no arrests had been made in connection with this case.

Garfield families had been expressing concerns about safety and security at the school for more than a year, but their calls had grown louder in recent months after a Garfield student was shot in the leg while he was waiting for a bus home from school in March.

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All of this has forced the district to rethink how it approaches school safety, said Fred Podesta, the district’s chief operating officer.

“Previously, our goal was to protect campuses from adult foreigners,” Podesta said. “That was really the main threat.”

But this year, “we’ve had more community issues around our campuses,” Podesta said.

He said the district is working hard to better secure school buildings. After the Ingraham High School shooting, the district’s first Safe and Caring Schools initiative included:

• Upgrade locks across the district so they can be activated inside the classroom;
• Improved security camera systems;
• New safety signage;
• Expanded consulting services and staff training programs;
• And the creation of new security teams on school campuses.

This work is largely complete. The district must now consider a different, community-wide approach that goes beyond school buildings but also falls within the purview of a school district, Podesta said.

Rethinking off-campus dining and campus policing

The district’s policy regarding off-campus lunches is one example. Adam and Murphy-Paine were shot and killed during lunch, as the district allowed high school students to leave campus.

After Murphy-Paine’s death, district officials closed the campus during lunch for the remainder of the school year. They’re now wondering whether that should be a permanent change — at Garfield and other schools facing increased security threats.

Podesta said the district plans to consult with students and families to get their feedback before making a final decision on various changes.

“It’s kind of a compromise and compromise on the atmosphere of the school,” Podesta said. “So which of these strategies makes things better and which might cross a line?” »

The district is also considering adding security personnel and re-evaluating the current moratorium on school resource officers and the Seattle Police Department’s school emphasis officer program.

In 2020, Seattle became one of several school districts nationwide to indefinitely suspend the program that stationed armed police officers in school buildings following several high-profile police killings.

Bringing back school resource officers (SROs) — or in Seattle’s case, they’re also called school guidance officers (SEOs) — is a deeply controversial prospect.

Some families and community leaders have called for the return of officers to school buildings following recent surges in violence.

Acting Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr recently told KUOW’s Soundside that Seattle schools should consider restarting the program. And in the Garfield High School Parent-Teacher-Student Association’s “School Safety Action Plan” proposed days after Murphy-Paine’s killing, reinstatement of school resource officers is at the top of the agenda. list of the group’s long-term solutions, with the addition of additional security officers. .

RELATED: Should cops return to Seattle high schools? Acting Chief Rahr signals she wants to talk about it

In a letter to families this week, Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Brent Jones said, “SPS staff and city officials are entering into active discussions about how SEOs and SROs could potentially work together. integrate into a continuous safety improvement program. » He also noted that the district and police department will engage students and the community before final decisions are made.

But others are concerned about the idea.

In a statement earlier this month, the Seattle Student Union denounced “any calls to reintroduce police into our schools after Black students and their allies worked tirelessly in 2020 to demand their removal.” Instead, the student advocacy group urged the district and city to expand support for youth mental health and crack down on guns.

Podesta said the district continues to have a “very strong” relationship with the police department and continues to work with them in ways other than the school guidance officer program.

He said some board members have expressed openness to a proposal to reinstate the program, if district staff believe it’s the right move. Podesta said the district will consider it over the summer, while being sensitive to the “spectrum of opinions” regarding policing on school campuses.

“We’ve certainly heard from some students that they’re not sure whether a sworn officer with a gun gives them peace of mind,” he said. “So we want to take that into account.”

School board President Liza Rankin said the board hasn’t considered taking action on the moratorium, but she doubts it’s the right solution.

“Personally, it would take a lot of convincing for me to bring this program back,” she said.