Humbolt Elementary School students climb under a parachute Thursday, June 2, 2022, the last day of school.

The shooting in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24 left 19 students and two teachers dead and 17 other people injured. In the aftermath of that shooting, many local school districts are asking themselves if they are doing enough to prevent a similar occurrence in their schools.

Plans including school resource officers, armed teachers and even armed veterans at schools are being debated nationally as a deterrent to school shootings with administrators torn as to which path to take to make their schools and students safer.

Here in Grant County, Humbolt Elementary Principal Janine Attlesperger said she and her staff regularly prepare for an active shooter scenario. “We do trainings throughout the year and we do drills with the kids.”

Attlesperger calls the staffing shortage in local law enforcement agencies “concerning” but stresses there hasn’t been a lot going on. “Each time we have had to call, response has been very quick, so we’ve been pleased with that, but it is concerning that we no longer have city police and they’re stretched very thin. We’re super hopeful that we can get (a school resource officer) that will cover all of our schools,” Attlesperger said.

The John Day Police Department used to provide a school resource officer, or SRO, under contract to the Grant School District, but the department was shut down in October due to budget constraints. A similar contract with the Grant County Sheriff’s Office is expected to go into effect next fall.

An officer assigned to the district’s three schools — Humbolt, Grant Union and Seneca — would go a long way toward deterring a potential school shooter just by their presence, according to Attlesperger. As it stands now, she and her custodians share a large portion of the burden of making sure their school is safe and secure.

“It’s up to me and the custodians to make sure the doors aren’t left open and everything is locked. We do our rounds regularly throughout the day, but having an SRO help out with that throughout the day would be great.”

The school does take precautions to ensure the safety of students and staff, but Attlesperger said there is room for improvement.

“This is an old school,” she pointed out. “It was built long before (a potential school shooting) was a concern. We have short- and long-term goals regarding safety at the school. It’s ongoing, and I think it will continue to be ongoing. We’re going to have to be constantly upgrading our systems to keep up with security.”

Talk of securing schools has led some critics to state that schools are starting to look more like prisons and less like places of learning for kids. Attlesperger says the beauty of Humbolt is its design. “The nice thing about the way our school is set up is that if the outer campus is secure, the kids can move freely throughout the rest of the campus. The playground is in the middle of the school. The way we’re configured, we can still have a very secure perimeter and move about freely.”

School shootings are a concern everywhere, according to Attlesperger. “I spent some time in Central Pennsylvania and there was an Amish school shooting. Somebody passing through, and you think that something like that could never happen. They don’t believe in locking doors, they don’t have fences around their schools. It just takes one person drifting by.”

Attlesperger said she is in favor of teachers being armed but not with any type of lethal force. “Accidents happen,” she said. Tasers and other non-lethal weapons would be acceptable, but Attlesperger said she doesn’t want to introduce the option of lethal force to an elementary school.

Another concern for Attlesperger is the amount of things schoolteachers are already responsible for that go beyond their normal teaching duties.

“What we ask of teachers already is draining. It takes every ounce of their being to be the best that they can be all day, every day for our kids. To put that on them I would never ask. Which is why we would like an SRO. They’re trained for that. Their primary job function is safety and security. That is not a teacher’s primary job function,” she said.

“It’s been a difficult couple years with COVID, and I would never ask them to do anything more. Teachers don’t clock out at 5 o’clock. When they aren’t working with the kids they are planning for working with the kids, and the kids are always on their minds. It is a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week job.”

Grant School District Superintendent Bret Uptmor said anytime there is an incident like Uvalde, school administrators across the nation are on “high alert.”

“We don’t know how this will transpire,” he said. “This happened so close to the end of our school year. A lot of our kids were focused on end-of-the-year studies, sports and things like that. For administrators, it means your eyes are going everywhere. One, to make sure that kids are doing what they need to do to finish the year out, as well as to make sure there is good safety in the buildings. That is always our top concern. Are we doing everything we possibly we can to make sure when kids come to school they are going to have assurances that it is a safe environment for them?”

Uptmor said the district is already in talks with the Sheriff’s Office to have a resource officer and it is just a matter of completing that process.

“The school board is on board,” he said. “They want to have somebody representing our law enforcement so that sense of safety and security is present. I believe that next year you’ll see something in our schools. We wish we could’ve gotten it done this year, but it wasn’t in the cards.”

Uptmor is confident local law enforcement would come to the aid of schools if needed.

“Am I comfortable that we will have good representation? Yes. My concern always is, can they be there fast and be present in a short amount of time at any of our schools?”

Uptmor declined to comment on the question of arming teachers with lethal or non-lethal force as a deterrent to school shootings, saying only that the school board discussed the issue in 2018.

Uptmor said security measures are in place in the district, but it’s impossible to plan for every possible scenario.

“What I worry the most about is we don’t know what other ways things could happen. That is always what worries me. What we don’t know could happen,” he said.

“I’ll just add that I’m always very impressed by our teachers, our staff, our board and our school administration, as well as right here in our own district office. We always have the safety of students in mind. We may not always end up with the same resolve when we talk about how to do things, but we come together as a team and we make it a safe place for our kids. I think as a county we do that, too, as superintendents. We’re always talking and making sure we support each other. That’s a really important trait to have in a county this size,” Uptmor said.