Las Vegas police visit 300 schools to calm fears

Las Vegas police sent officers to all 300 public and private schools in the city Friday to ease fears shortly after a gunman walked into an elementary school 2,500 miles away in Newtown, Conn., killing 20 children and six adults at the school.

Police had no word of a copycat but mobilized to “lower the fear to let you know we’re here,” said Deputy Chief Kevin McMahill, noting that parents and those at schools were noticeably on edge.

“The moment I heard about it, the hairs on the back of my neck rose, and I knew we had to take immediate action,” McMahill said.

He emphasized police could not have prevented the shooting because the gunman wasn’t a stranger and had regular access to the school because his mother was a teacher there.

Although most of Clark County’s 357 public schools lie within the Las Vegas area, Las Vegas police do not have primary jurisdiction over the schools. The Clark County School District has its own independent police force of about 140 officers. District police often partner with city police and allow access to campuses, as it did Friday, school police spokesman Lt. Ken Young said.

Las Vegas and school police regularly come together for anti-terrorism training for possible scenarios like Friday’s shooting, school police Lt. Darnell Couthen said.

State law already requires every Nevada school to have response plans for a shooting.

For those reasons, the district – the fifth-largest in the nation with 311,000 students – made no knee-jerk reactions Friday to the Connecticut shooting, Couthen said.

“We prepare and prepare,” he said.

Schools must not only make crisis plans but must annually update them, train every employee and run drills with students to practice lockdowns, evacuations and reverse evacuations, which means sending students into the school if something outside presents a danger.

“Anything we can learn from this tragedy, we will,” Couthen said of the Connecticut shooting. He noted the Columbine, Colo., shooting in 1999 sparked many of these rules in Nevada schools.

He wouldn’t elaborate on school police tactics for shootings but said two officers are permanently stationed at each of the 49 high schools. The 59 middle schools and 217 elementary schools don’t have any officers on site unless help is requested.

Whether that will change because of Friday’s elementary school shooting or whether more visitor restrictions will be put into place at Clark County schools remains to be seen, he said.

One simple fact remains.

“This potentially could happen anywhere,” said Rosemary Virtuoso, coordinator of student threat evaluation and crisis response for the district. “We need to give children a sense of control.”

That control comes from the crisis response plans that must be drilled into students.

“People tend to freeze. We have to get more automatic,” she said, noting that the last drill was a week and a half ago. Before Friday’s schooting, more schools already planned for drills in the beginning of 2013. “The more we do it, the better we get.”

Contact reporter Trevon Milliard at tmilliard@review journal.com or 702-383-0279.