With Highland Park and Uvalde on their minds, CPS officials unveil safety plans, conduct active shooter drill
Four days before the new school year begins, Chicago Public Schools officials sought to reassure parents that their children’s physical and emotional well-being is top of mind. Thursday’s safety plan announcement comes nearly three months after a horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and six weeks after a mass shooting in Highland Park.
“When they send their children back to school this Monday, families need to know that there is a plan to keep their students safe,” CPS CEO Pedro Martinez said during a news conference at Percy Julian High School in the Washington Heights neighborhood.
Without going into much detail, CPS announced a new partnership with Safer Schools Together, an agency that delivers digital threat assessment, violence and bullying prevention training to schools and communities. CPS Safety and Security Chief Jadine Chou said this initiative will allow the district to stage an intervention before a social media situation escalates.
Also Thursday, CPS conducted an active shooter drill with the city Office of Emergency Management and Communications, the Chicago Police Department and Chicago Fire Department. Police officers and firefighters rolled stretchers into Julian High for the first cross-agency active shooter drill in CPS since 2018. The drill was not open to the media.
“None of us want to imagine ... gun violence in our schools, but recent mass shootings like we’ve seen in Uvalde and in nearby Highland Park have brought these concerns front and center. As a district, we know that we need to be prepared for anything,” Martinez said Thursday, referencing the deadly incidents on July 4 in the northern suburb and in May at an elementary school in Texas, not far from Martinez’s prior posting in San Antonio.
Chou said CPS conducts 3,800 annual drills — including fire, tornado, allergen and active shooter drills. Every school is required to conduct at least six of them each year. Staff members and teachers volunteered their participation Thursday, but there were no students on hand, as these drills “can be traumatizing” to children, Chou said.
Also Thursday, CPS released videos on the safety page of its website that explore how the district is addressing security concerns.
“All schools must be a safe zone for all of our students and staff,” Chou said. “And we do this by not only making sure that we’re prepared, but by also being proactive.”
CPS’ safety plan includes the $22 million Safe Passage Program to help usher students to school safely; $8 million for technology to support students’ physical safety on school grounds; the Choose to Change mentoring program, which received a $9.2 million boost this school year; an $18 million intervention initiative targeting 1,000 youth who have been disconnected from school for more than a year; and various social-emotional supports.
The Chicago Board of Education, meanwhile, voted last month on a $10.1 million contract with the police department for school resource officers for the coming school year. High schools that are part of the program can have one or two uniformed officers per campus.
Last year, 12 of 53 schools decided to exit the program by removing both officers. This year, most of the 41 remaining schools kept their status quo, while two schools removed one officer and one school, Dunbar Vocational Career Academy, axed both. For the schools that got rid of one or both officers, more than $3.7 million total is going to alternative resources such as restorative justice coordinators, intervention specialists and related programming, Chou said.
