POLK COUNTY, Fla. — Polk County Public School focuses on safety and security as students start the new year.
“My daughter was the one that wanted to be home-schooled. My daughter was terrified to go back to school,” said Trisha Harvard.
Last school year, Trisha Harvard said a video was posted to social media that depicted her 10-year-old daughter being shot by a classmate.
“My daughter is a social butterfly that is now scared to have friends because the girls that she thought were her friends decided to make a video about killing her,” Harvard said.
Harvard took her concerns to Polk County School Board, but she said the student who made the threat was not disciplined.
“It was a direct threat, and Polk County [Schools] did not take it that way and has yet to take it that way. I went and took everything to a Polk County judge, and a Polk County judge gave me a restraining order on this little girl,” Harvard said.
Harvard wants to see the school district take threats more seriously.
“We take even the smallest threats, and we try to get to the root of it,” said Sgt. Justin Conatser.
According to Conatser, sergeant of the Lakeland Police Department’s school resource officer unit, 500 school-related threats were investigated last year.
“If it’s a kid that is alleging that they are going to shoot up the school, we have a process that we identify the student. We search the student, and then we go so far as to go to the house and explain to the parents why we’re there. We then ask them if we are able to check your home to make sure that they don’t have access to a weapon,” Conatser said.
Last year, middle and high schools began randomly searching students for weapons. The school district is now expanding security measures to include walk-through metal detectors. Conatser said this decreases the chances of students entering the door with a gun.
“There should not be a weapon on campus immediately, so we’re only going to be concerned with any kind of outside threats. We’ve tried to mitigate that with single-point access,” Conatser said.
He said SROs participate in multiple drills, preparing them for an active shooter situation if it ever were to happen.
“We actually tried to mock up Marjory Stoneman Douglas. We have a school here in Lakeland that has a building very similar to MSD. So what we did is we tried to replicate that in terms of running, response, going through stairs,” said Conatser.
