School safety is obviously a hot topic for students, parents, administration, and the entire country, rising in importance as the months go on. This year alone there have been
over 12 school shootings and it leaves us all with a single question in our minds – how can we prevent this?

While our country is stormed with opposing ideas like more thorough background checks, gun control, arming teachers or putting up metal detectors for when go on campus, we are all certain about one thing – school safety begins with the school itself and how prepared they are for incidents like this.

Recently, Sahuaro was plastered all over local news after a weak response time to an incident.

On February 26, during 6th period, Ms. Krause, an English teacher whose windows face the courtyard, had her windows bombarded by rocks, making loud shattering noises and sending glass flying. She and her class immediately thought they were going to be the next victims of a school shooting or attack. After all, they had literally just finished discussing the Parkland shooting. Needless to say, they were absolutely terrified. Ms. Krause was ready and instructed the students to go under their desks while she frantically pressed the call button to get someone to help them. It turned out that the call button in the room, along with many others, wasn’t working.

Naturally, she called the office in hopes of getting assistance, but it went straight to voicemail. It wasn’t until eight minutes later when a monitor strolled in, calmly stating that it was just a special education student who was left unattended and threw the rocks both through the windows of the Career and College Center and Ms. Krause’s room.

Ms. Krause was understandably frustrated and wondered why it took an entire eight minutes for someone to show up. With two broken windows, one in the Career Center (lower 300) and one in Ms. Krause’s room (lower 200), it made us wonder too.

Since the incident, Principal Estrella is taking action.  He told staff during a Professional Development that his team will be checking all the emergency call buttons throughout the school and putting in a work order for the ones that don’t beep into the front office.  He also stated that whenever Ms. Saldutti, Sahuaro office manager, is away from her desk, she will forward her phone to other office staff. He too thinks that the slow response was unacceptable and wants to fix the problem so that they’re better prepared if an incident like that were to ever happen again.