DENVER — A day after two school administrators were shot by a 17-year-old student inside East High School, dozens of students called on legislators to take action at the Colorado State Capitol.
When the Denver Police Department said the shooting happened during a routine pat down of the student, which was part of a safety plan, countless questions about what exactly safety plans are and how they work arose.
Robert Gould, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA) and a special education teacher, said he has worked with hundreds of students who have safety plans and has helped draft them in some cases.
“A group of educators and parents, they generally come together and we talk about what are the needs for that particular student," Gould said regarding creating specific school safety plans. “They’re for students because they're going through crisis... What can we do as a school to support those needs to make that student feel safe, and make others feel safe around them?”
Gould said behavioral health support can be part of a safety plan, but that really depends on if the school has the necessary resources to provide it to a student.
“The reality is that many of our schools just don't have the staff to meet those needs," said Amie Baca-Oehlert, president of the Colorado Education Association. “As a school counselor, I was one counselor to over 400 students... Certainly, we would want mental health support to be a part of a safety plan, but we really have to work within the resources that we have in our schools.”
Baca-Oehlert called the issues surrounding school safety very complex problems with no simple solution, but said more funding would help tremendously. Baca-Oehlert and Gould hope that funding comes from state legislators.
“Our educators are struggling right now. It's a difficult time," said Baca-Oehlert. “Certainly, we are in the midst of a very extreme educator shortage. And we worry that when things like this happen, it's just one more thing to push somebody potentially out of the classroom, out of our schools.”
Gould said the cumulative stress felt by school staff is ultimately transferred down to the students.
“These forced choices of, 'Do we do we have enough bus drivers? Do we have to have enough routes? Do we have enough lunchroom staff? Do we have enough teachers to support our students?' And at the end of the day, our students are the ones that are affected," Gould said. “Every day I get another phone call from an educator that says, 'Help. We need something, we need more people, we need help.'”
Baca-Oehlert said CEA is in support of several bills moving through the state legislature. One of them would expand the list of petitioners of Extreme Risk Protection Orders to include teachers, and another would raise the age of a person legally allowed to possess a firearm to 21.
