Board of Education approves countywide school safety plans

The Alleghany County Board of Education voted to approve school safety plans for all four county schools during their monthly meeting Dec. 8. The following are reports from each school on its individual plan. Glade Creek School

According to Glade Creek School’s safe schools plan, the school has five goals or objectives for this school year, which began as early as Aug. 1 and are scheduled to end in May. “We like to use all the people we have and we like to involve all the stakeholders, whether it be students, parents or staff,” Principal Gary West said referring to the implementation of the goals.

The first objective is to integrate character education into grade-level curriculum.

In the document handed out by West, this objective is planned to be carried out through five class activities during the school year that integrate character education into the regular kindergarten through fifth grade curriculum.

“We have a group of students trained to be peer mediators and then, we also have a group involved in student council,” West explained. These students “do activities with (the younger classes) and provide plays for them that demonstrate character education and take the word of the month to do that.”

The second goal in the plan is to provide non-violent crisis intervention training, suicide prevention and other staff update training. Under the plan, the school’s guidance counselor was asked to review previous training procedures for crisis intervention and suicide prevention. According to the timeline, this was to be completed by Oct. 15.

The third objective is to use safe school information to plan development activities for staff. This is scheduled to be implemented through information garnered from safe school surveys.

The information gathered from the safe school surveys is used to plan staff development and address student needs, according to West. One of these issues is bullying.

“A lot of times, students don’t realize that name calling or simple little things that seem like harmless picking to them, is bullying,” he said. “Our kids are affected by it and we take it seriously.” The fourth goal is to involve students in accomplishing the safe school goals. Under the plan, the student council members were asked to complete five service projects and peer mediators were asked to provide four character education programs for students. The Beta Club members were asked to provide 10 hours of school service and 10 hours of community service, while all students must complete safe school surveys. The final objective is to improve academic performance and behavior of all at-risk students.

This implementation will make the staff and principal responsible to assist students at risk of academic and behavior failure, according to the document.

Piney Creek School

According to Piney Creek’s safe schools plan, the school has two primary goals or objectives, which began in October and are scheduled to end in July.

The first objective is to provide for the physical and environmental security of students and staff in relation to all school functions.

“A lot of these items are maintenance-type items that (School Maintenance Director Donald Reeves) and the guys are already aware of and are working on,” Principal Phil Howell noted. The document stated that five strategies will be implemented to achieve this objective. In March, 2005, the pre-kindergarten playground and gym will be updated in accordance with certification requirements. In April, 2005 there are plans to make provisions for appropriate reflectors and signs for emergency evacuation routes.

Also planned are the acquisition of additional bus cameras, scheduled for May.

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