Principal and Superintendent of the West Side School Rhonda Bellmer has seen a lot and done a lot in her 25 years in education, but she admits she’s struggling with the recent tragedies related to school shootings around the country.
“Thirteen years ago (when I first came to West Side), when I was looking at safety in schools I was not dealing with shooters on campus. That was not even on my mind,” she said.
“The idea of fire — the school burned down in 2007 so we know all about fire. And, we always knew about the potential for a disgruntled person, when you deal with children and separated families and custody, I always had that in my mind,” Bellmer said. “But, then I started going to trainings and suddenly this idea of a shooter on campus was becoming much more prominent. As administrators, we’ve been trained in that for a long time. But I have to say, Parkland did change things for a lot of us. We did wake up the next day and say ‘its just so different now,’ as administrators.”
West Side, like all schools, has a comprehensive safety plan, as required by state law, which is updated yearly. In districts with over 1,000 students the plan must go through a site council, but West Side is small and it utilizes a safety committee made up of staff members who know the campus best. Drills are a large part of that, and Bellmer has seen the nature of those drills change over time.
“A lot of past practice was, ‘what if you had an emergency, what if there is an earthquake, what if you had something that caused you to have to stay on your campus? How could you make it safe for kids, how could you feed them, how could you have water for them, how could you have blankets for them?’ That was the focus, and that was the way I thought about this responsibility in the beginning and now that’s all changed.”
Students at West Side now go through monthly fire drills, earthquake drills four times a year and lockdown drills “all the time.” For a true active shooter situation, they drill once a year on what is called a “red flag drill.”
An adult walks through campus carrying a red flag and they time how long it takes that person to be noticed and then get the word out to “as many people as possible, in whatever way you can do it, and then locking down.”
West Side also has Columbine locks on all the doors, which means all classrooms are lockable from the inside. Teachers are encouraged to practice using the keys so it becomes second nature, and all volunteers on the campus are given purple loaner keys and told to practice so they too can lock a room quickly. “No one comes on this campus without a key so that wherever they are, even my AAUW women (volunteers) know that they might have to lock down, and I say ‘go in and practice and make sure you are comfortable with it,’” Bellmer said.
Since West Side is an elementary school, Bellmer has a fine line to walk between preparing her students for a terrible scenario but not scaring them.
“Years ago my Kindergarten teacher came and said the fire drills scare the heck out of the kids, so for our regular drills we give notice to our younger grades so the teacher can prepare the students, we’re very strict about that. We praise them (for being) cooperative and we try to make them feel relaxed but confident,” Bellmer explained.
“Shooters on campus brought a whole (new) thing, five years ago we started drills for that,” she said. “We tell the children, anything can happen. We can have a wild animal on campus, there can be a gas leak or a bad person can come onto our campus and if they do, we have to go into our classrooms and lock down. And the kids know the lockdown term.
“We also tell the teachers to have conversations with the kids about where you would go, so teachers have little private conversations about, ‘this is the place we would go in this classroom, in this space to protect ourselves.’ They do it in a calm time when they aren’t feeling a sense of alarm,” Bellmer finished.
That doesn’t mean the students don’t understand exactly what goes on in the world. “The kids know a shooter,” she said. “The kids know enough. Some of my little kids down at the creek — we have a fishery project down in our creek — and one day a bunch of second graders came running into my office, ‘Miss Bellmer, Miss Bellmer! There’s a man with a gun in the creek.’ I go down to see what I can see and what I’ve got down in the creek is two biologists in camo clothes with a water flow device telescopically collapsed on their shoulder. That’s how alert my kids are and they saw that from the garden.”
“The older they are and the more up the grades we go the more realistic we are,” she continued. “There isn’t a fourth through sixth grader at my school who doesn’t understand that a shooter can come on this campus. But, I also have first and second graders whose parents have not exposed them in any way shape or form to that possibility and would be very upset if we emphasized that too much.”
While the atmosphere may have changed, Bellmer has always felt the weight of her calling. “I never doubted for a moment that it is an awesome responsibility, to be in charge of people’s children,” she said. “One hundred and eighty four kids every day, and you literally go home at the end of some days and say, ‘another good day, no one was hurt.’ But that kind of hurt used to be falling off the monkey bars. Now, I have a different feeling every day. I go home at the end of the day and think, ‘There but for the grace of God go I, or us.’”
Bellmer knows there is no immunity from gun violence. “It’s so interesting to me. So many people, they stack up the statistics for the (school shootings) they’ve known and they say, ‘well, not here.’ I don’t think that way; I think just the opposite, ‘why not here?’ If it can be in Parkland, why not here? So it’s a very different attitude, I don’t feel any false sense of safety.”
Because of that, Bellmer felt even more lost after the shootings in Parkland, Florida. “One the reasons I hesitated right after the event to do this quick (response), I was sickened for three days. What am I going to tell my parents? I’m going to keep your kids safe from an AR-15? I’m not keeping their kids safe from an AR-15, it’s not going to happen, it’s not possible. The thoughtful thing I did after all this was to say, ‘these are all the things we do.’ We’re trying to make a very good effort and it will probably never be good enough, but you’ve got to keep on, keeping on. You’ve got to keep trying.”
To that end, Bellmer presented first to her school board, and then in a handout emailed home to all the West Side families, an explanation of their comprehensive safety plan and all the things done by the school to create as safe a spot as possible, from the training staff receives for emergency preparedness to the technology that makes communication easier.
In addition, the West Side school board passed a resolution in support of school safety and common sense gun laws that has been passed on to all applicable legislators. Bellmer is set to retire in June. “I have to say that one of the things for me is that I’ve been in education for 25 years and it just saddens me no end. But, I also feel angry and I feel active,” she said, adding that that sense of action is embodied in the resolution.
In the meantime, she will continue to safeguard her 184 charges. “I would say that our processes are always improving. We’re in a constant state of refinement. We need our due diligence, whether it’s in a parking lot or a playground, we need all of those to be the best things they can be for our kids,” she said. “But also, we want to be protecting them to have a little innocence in their lives, too. As adults, we want that too.”
