Colfax school superintendent addresses school safety concerns
PROTECTED CONTENT
If you’re a current subscriber, log in below. If you would like to subscribe, please click the subscribe tab above.
Username and Password Help
Please enter your email and we will send your username and password to you.
By LeAnn R. Ralph
COLFAX — If Wisconsin citizens would like to see school resource officers in their local schools, they should talk to their legislators, says William C. Yingst Jr., superintendent of the Colfax school district.
Yingst discussed school safety at the Colfax Board of Education’s June 20 meeting after one person spoke to the school board during the public comments portion of the meeting.
If there is an active shooter in the school, ALICE training does not work, said area resident Denise Solberg.
ALICE training (alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate) is a program that was developed to have a plan in place in the event of an active shooter in a building. ALICE training is most often associated with schools, but the training is available for businesses, clinics, hospitals and churches, too.
At the Sandy Hook elementary school, the principal never got beyond “alert,” because the principal was killed when the shooter entered the building, Solberg said.
The Sandy Hook school shooting occurred in December of 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut, when a 20-year-old man killed 26 people, 20 of whom were children between the ages of six and seven, and six were adult school staff members.
The “lockdown” part of ALICE did not help in Uvalde, Texas, Solberg said.
In May of this year, an 18-year-old man killed nineteen students and two teachers and wounded a number of others at Robb Elementary in Ulvade.
Asking small children to throw objects at an intruder is not a solution, Solberg said, noting that some doors at the Colfax schools are not locked or may be propped open, providing opportunities for intruders to enter the school buildings.
Solberg said she was requesting that all of the school administrators be armed or that two school resource officers should be hired.
SWAT
During his superintendent’s report, Yingst responded to Solberg’s comments and pointed out that he considers school safety to be of the utmost importance.
In March, the Dunn County SWAT team conducted training in the Colfax school buildings, he said.
All law enforcement officers in the county have access to all of the schools, and that includes all of the doors in the Colfax school buildings. Law enforcement officers enter the buildings both during the day and at night, Yingst said.
When new officers are hired, they are shown around the county’s school buildings to familiarize themselves with the layout, he said.
Yingst serves on the county-wide school safety committee, which has been meeting quarterly for 12 years, and has worked with Dunn County Sheriff Kevin Bygd both before Bygd was elected as sheriff when he was employed by the sheriff’s department and after Bygd was elected as sheriff.
Yingst said he was “100 percent certain” law enforcement officers would be entering the building in an active school shooter situation.
SROs
For the past 10 years Yingst said he has been saying that schools need school resource officers.
Several years ago, the Wisconsin Department of Justice offered two safe schools grants that totaled about $170,000, he said.
The money could be spent on just about anything you could think of related to school safety — except school resource officers, Yingst said.
A very small portion of the money could be used to hire school resource officers, but after the grant expenditure period expired, then the school districts would have the annual expense of salaries and benefits for the school resource officers, he said.
Schools in Wisconsin, along with all forms of municipal government, must operate under state-imposed revenue limits.
Under the revenue limits, schools are placed in a position of having to cut expenses to remain within the revenue limit and often have difficulty finding money to hire additional teachers, if they need them, much less trying to find the money to hire school resource officers.
Defense
So far, all of the tools available to schools for school safety are defensive to deter school shooters, Yingst said.
Legislatures at the state and federal level should provide funding and ways to fortify and protect schools, he said.
ALICE was never intended to stop school shootings and is a tool to use in a worst-case scenario, Yingst said, adding that he and the other administrators at Colfax have the training and the certification to do the ALICE training.
ALICE will not stop a school shooter, but it will buy seconds and minutes until law enforcement arrives, he said.
One of the concepts of ALICE is “anything beats nothing,” Yingst said.
Schools are considered “soft targets,” even with locked doors and bullet-proof glass, but buildings that are considered to be “hard targets” are not accessible to the public, he said.
People do not want their schools to be fortresses, but they do want their schools to be fortified, Yingst said.
Priority
Yingst said that taking care of the students and school staff is a high priority for him and noted that he has experience and background in security because when he served with the United States Army in Afghanistan for 13 months, he was in charge of base camp security.
Survivability of terrorist attacks is the key, Yingst said, adding that he considers school shootings to be terrorist attacks.
“Money drives the train,” he said.
If people want school resource officers, then they should contact their legislators, both state and federal, to ask for funding, Yingst said.
As a country, the United States spends money on many other things, so why not school resource officers? he said.
Accelerated Reader
Trevor Hovde, principal at Colfax Elementary, reported that 344 students at Colfax Elementary participated in the Accelerated Reader program this past year.
There were 16 students who read more than one million words; four students read more than two million words; two students read more than three million words; and one student read more than four million words. Total number of words read were 102,395,127, he said.
The students passed 29,583 reading comprehension quizzes and earned 25,848.1 points, Hovde said.
There were 159 students who scored 90 percent or above on the quizzes, with an average comprehension score of 89 percent. Research shows that students who maintain a comprehension score of 90 percent or higher can make two years of reading growth in one year, he said.
Once again this year, Colfax Elementary is partnering with the Colfax Public Library to encourage reading over the summer.
Students can accumulate points to put toward AR prizes during June, July and August, and those points will be added to their records in September. Students can continue to take AR quizzes at home this summer, Hovde said.
More reading
Students in junior kindergarten through sixth grade also used the myON reading program through Renaissance Learning, Hovde said.
The myON program allows students to read books on line and then take Accelerated Reader quizzes on those books, he said.
All together, students read 7,385 books and spent 2,238 hours on the reading program, Hovde said.
This is the third year of using the myON program, and it provides an opportunity for students to read non-fiction books, Hovde said.
Other business
In other business, the Colfax Board of Education:
• Learned that Colfax High School will be offering 37 credits in the 2022-2023 school year that can be put toward a two or four year college degree. The classes include horticulture, medical terminology, MS office, marketing, computer aided drafting, accounting, psychology, criminal justice, AP calculus, AP biology, economics, speech, Sign Language I and II, statistics and sociology.
• Learned that Colfax High School had a 100 percent graduation rate for the Class of 2022.
• Learned that the Colfax Elementary spring concert is available on the school district website.
• Learned that 160 students are enrolled in the summer swimming program at the Elk Mound High School swimming pool.
• Learned that 93 students are signed up for Summer Saunters on the Ice Age Trail. This is the largest number of students who have signed up for Summer Saunters, Hovde said.
• Received a reminder that the school district’s annual meeting is Monday, August 15, at 5 p.m. The regular school board meeting will follow at 6 p.m.
• Approved setting the audit review at 5 p.m. Monday, July 11, and the budget review meeting at 5:30 p.m. Monday, July 11.
• Authorized Yingst to make any necessary budget adjustments by the end of the school year on June 30.
• Reviewed the long-term capital improvement plan. Items listed on the plan will be funded with money in Fund 46. Projects for the 2022-2023 school year include security upgrades; repaving certain areas around the elementary school, high school and bus area; purchasing an LP bus; and technology upgrades. Fund 46 was created June 15, 2015, and the money was available to used as of June 15, 2020. Money left over from the budget can be placed into Fund 46 to use for improvements listed in the capital improvement plan.