School safety, security, and violence prevention resource

This week seems to be full of irritation for me. I know it is the week of Thanksgiving and all but what I have been reading on the news makes it hard to be in good spirits. I don’t know if you heard about it, but apparently, the Cleveland school authorities have been letting an $80,000 grant sit on its butt –after it was already given to them to use for school safety measures!

If it weren’t for an outside investigation done by 5 On Your Side, this might not have seen the light of day!

The scene outside Success Tech High School on October 10, 2007 was frantic. A student carrying a bagful of weapons roamed the hallways and eventually turned a gun on himself.
You might think the school system would move quickly to do whatever it could to protect students. So did the Cleveland City Council.

“I’m disappointed,” Councilman Kevin Conwell said. Conwell is one of 18 members of the City Council who voted unanimously for a program they believed would save lives.

The program is a computerized mapping system showing every school hallway, every room, and every closet where a gunmen could hide.

Conwell said, “I was surprised. I thought it was being used because all grants have deadlines.”

So what is going on?

But 14 months after Cleveland got its money, not a dime’s been spent.

NewsChannel5 found that the project was suddenly abandoned by top school officials 6 months after the grant was awarded.

Meanwhile, the city’s public safety director concedes these could be costly delays. Martin Flask said, “People’s lives, children’s live are always at stake. And if you have a good idea and you have the funds to move forward, it’s better to move as quickly as you can because you reduce the potential risk associated with delay.”

Flask said there was plenty of money to map about a dozen targeted schools. But top school officials called it too expensive after demanding that every school be included or none at all. Now, student’s safety will have to wait even longer while a new grant request is filed.

Since the school officials have declined to be interviewed by the media, we do not know what exactly happened. What we do know is that that $80,000 has not been used for school safety.

This really irks me to no end. We have heard so many complaints about insufficient funding. We have heard so many statements to the effect that things could have been so much better had there been money to support school safety campaigns. Now this establishment, they had that much money but didn’t use it! What good are grants for if this is how school officials deal with them?

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