LPOSD grapples with security against grim backdrop

SANDPOINT — Although a recent poll of staff at the Lake Pend Oreille School District shows little support for arming school personnel, there is a strong consensus for additional security measures of some sort.

The poll, conducted by the Lake Pend Oreille Education Association, drew responses from 80 percent of the district’s certified staff and about 50 percent of its classified staff.

Only 14 percent of the classified staff and 8 percent of the certified staff supported a policy of training and arming colleagues to guard against a violent attack on school grounds. But 92 percent of the certified staff and 86 percent of the classified staff supported some type of additional safety measure, including hiring additional school resource officers.

The district’s board of trustees are pondering school safety amid fresh incidents of school campus violence, which included the deaths of two educators, elsewhere in the nation.

On Monday, a 12-year-old boy shot a teacher to death before turning the gun on himself in Sparks, Nev. On Tuesday, a popular math teacher was slain by a student with a box cutter in Danvers, Mass.

A number of district staff voting in favor of a school resource officer or some other additional measures qualified their responses in the poll, according to Brian Smith of the LPOEA. Some supported additional school resource officers only if taxpayers were willing to fund them or if the cost did not detract from academic programs.

“Hiring school counselors came up multiple times as a better use of funds,” Smith, a Sandpoint High School teacher, told trustees during its board meeting on Tuesday.

Another consistent theme in the poll was that Clark Fork was perceived as vulnerable due to the prospect of an extended response time for law enforcement.

“They felt really strongly. That was a consistent message over and over again from the people in Clark Fork,” Smith said.

Steve Youngdahl, chairman of the district’s board of trustees, said he confirmed the estimated worst-case-scenario response times with law enforcement.

“The response times, given the worst conditions, could be as long as 20 minutes,” Youngdahl told trustees. “It was identified, definitely, as a vulnerability.”

The district has one school resource officer stationed in Sandpoint. The officer is employed by the Sandpoint Police Department, but the district funds 60 percent of the officer’s salary, which amounts to $41,000.

However, the board appeared open to the concept of using retired military and law enforcement personnel in the community to staff volunteer patrols that would be picked, trained and outfitted by the Bonner County Sheriff’s Office.

Such a patrol could cost $10,000-$15,000, according to preliminary estimates. The patrol could bring response times in rural areas in line with response times in Sandpoint.

Some survey respondents emphasized the importance of having professionally trained security personnel, but unease abides in some circles about addressing school safety with more guns. They point to multiple instances across country where people trained in using firearms, including police and military officials, have been accidentally wounded or killed by mishandled guns.

• An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Brian Smith by his first name. Smith's name has been corrected in the body of the story.