School Safety Summit trains education leaders, law enforcement

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - Louisiana State Police, school leaders and lawmakers are working to try to make sure your kids are safe when they go to school.

Throughout the day, those responsible for keeping students safe were trained on best practices.

“Just don’t be the person on the news that has a lot of hurt kids to say I went through training, I don’t know how this happened. Go back and do something. Just don’t take this certificate and say I went through training,” said Sean Burke, president of the Safety Advisory Council, in his address to inspire Thursday’s participants to make changes.

“We have created a check-the-box mentality in education. That means that I just must check the box. Yeah, I have an emergency plan, I have this, I have that and just check the box, never really do anything well. What it does is it makes us rely on gadgets.”

Lawmakers were in attendance to understand the needs of educators and law enforcement.

“To be able to find out what we’re currently doing, learn what strategy we have, but probably just as importantly, is to learn what we can do as legislators and lawmakers to help those who are on the front line to do their job and to secure the safety for our children, so that we never have a tragedy such as those that occurred in Texas and other places,” Mike Johnson, state representative for District 27 said.

Cade Brumley, the state superintendent of education, said there is nothing more important than keeping students safe.

“We need to create a culture where if kids see something that doesn’t seem right, if they hear something, that they tell an adult in the building that something is not right. I think we need to harden our perimeters and not be soft targets. We need to have access control so that we know who is coming in and out of buildings and we make that a little inconvenient. Unfortunately, we need to make sure that our kids have access to social workers and counselors and then we need to continue the training together between law enforcement and school systems,” Brumley said.

He added Thursday’s sessions are also about building relationships, so folks can go back to their communities and continue to ensure kids are safe.

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