BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — The East Baton Rouge Parish School System is bringing a safety report to the table for this week’s school board meeting. The school board will be discussing new concepts and future implementations of safety measures. This is happening after a recent school brawl in the district.
Director of Communications for the EBR School System Ben Lemoine says the board will be looking for ways to keep campuses safe.
“Which schools have fences that are complete and the school is fortified? Which schools have door locks and things like that? So those are all things that we’ve been analyzing and cataloging, and that’s what we will be addressing from a physical campus perspective,” says Lemoine.
Lemoine says another concept that the school system could implement is more school resource officers around the district, which can help stop future problems.
“The ability for us to have the professionals on campus to sort of evaluate students and have a pulse for what’s going on so they could intervene before anything tragic happens,” he said.
Lemoine also mentioned that the school system is aware of the problems and concerns of parents when it comes down to safety, but many measures are often not spoken about for safety reasons.
“We have to do things sort of behind the scenes because we’re working with law enforcement and working with very sensitive intelligence in a lot of cases. And because our partners, our law enforcement partners, they have investigations happening. And, you know, we can’t let the public know what’s going on with their investigation for obvious reasons,” said Lemoine.
Overall Lemoine says the school system wants families to know that safety is a top priority.
“The things that we’re putting in place are to ensure that safety is there. It’s for peace of mind, and it is for the actual safety and security of our students and staff,” he said.
The school board will be presented with the security report during the board meeting at 5 p.m. on Thursday, April 20 and will also welcome feedback from the community and parents.
For more information on the set agenda, click here.
