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October 10, 2006 12:00 pm
Joplin school official: 'Our crisis plan worked'
By Andy Ostmeyer
CNHI News Service
JOPLIN, Mo. — What had all the earmarks of a deadly school shooting ended without an injury in part because of school policy designed to head that off, said Joplin R-8 Superintendent Jim Simpson.
“Our crisis plan worked effectively,” he said. “Our intruder plan worked effectively.”
The first two things administrators are to do when an intruder enters a school are lock down the building and call 911. That’s exactly what happened Monday, Simpson said.
School officials then are to isolate the intruder and try to get him to leave the building.
“Again, that occurred,” Simpson said.
In the wake of school shootings recently in other states, Joplin school officials had been practicing lockdowns in the event of an emergency. On Monday, when a 13-year-old Memorial Middle School student took an assault rifle to the school, pointed it at two students and two administrators, and then shot into the ceiling, administrators followed the school’s plan.
“The school’s crisis and training plan in a very difficult and dangerous situation was operated and implemented in a very effective manner,” Simpson said.
“I think it was handled pretty well,” said Linda Meier, president of the Memorial Middle School Parent-Teacher Organization, praising school and police officials.
This is not the first time local school officials have had to deal with weapons being taken into the schools.
There were 21 disciplinary incidents involving weapons in Joplin schools in the 2004-05 school year, the most recent year for which the statistics are available. The rate, based on student enrollment, was three times the state average that year.
Unlike Monday’s incident, most of those incidents involved knives and martial arts weapons, and not firearms, Simpson said.
In three previous years, the rate of disciplinary incidents involving weapons in Joplin was at or below the state average, according to statistics reported by public schools and compiled by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Statewide, there were 815 disciplinary incidents involving weapons in 2004-05, according to the state department. That is a ratio of 0.10 per every 100 students; in Joplin, the ratio was 0.30 per every 100 students, according to data reported in October 2005.
A weapon is defined by the state as any device or instrument capable of causing serious bodily injury. The definition does not include a knife with a blade of less than 2.5 inches.
Jim Morris, spokesman for the department, said the statistics stem from disciplinary incidents, which schools are required to report, and are broken out based on the type of offense, such as drugs, alcohol, violence or weapons, for example. They are not crime reports, he noted.
Jim Coburn, president of the Joplin R-8 Board of Education, said he has no reason to believe Joplin is out of the box when it comes to such problems, and that the reports could be the result of training staff members and teaching students about potential problems.
“What I want to believe and what I do believe is that we have such a heightened awareness,” Coburn said.
Two Joplin parents said that even after Monday’s incident, they are confident their children are in a safe environment.
“I felt the schools are pretty safe,” said Jud Fisher. “I don’t have any trouble taking my kids into a public school.”
Meier, president of the PTO, agreed, and added that there is only so much schools can do.
“People do crazy things, and you cannot always be prepared,” she said.
Andy Ostmeyer writes for The Joplin (Mo.) Globe. Staff writer Dustin Shipman contributed to this story.
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