Published: October 30, 2009 09:37 am      

Smith crisis a learning experience

Smith Middle School is up to date in its emergency procedures. It got there through an unscheduled training exercise.

The report of a possible gun on campus at about 9 a.m. Wednesday kicked Cleburne police officers and Cleburne ISD officials into high gear.

For part of the day, all Cleburne ISD campuses were in hard lockdown. By the time the all-clear was announced in midafternoon, all involved were confident no gun existed.

But it wasn’t a wasted day, Superintendent Dr. Ronny Beard said Thursday.

Lessons were learned for future reference.

“I was extremely pleased with the administrative staff at Smith and with the police and the way they both acted,” Beard said. “It’s always disconcerting for a parent to hear there may be a weapon at your child’s campus. But after the procedure, we had a lot of response from parents saying it was handled very well. They felt very comfortable with their children’s safety.

“We did learn some things. Locking down schools because somebody said they saw a weapon is a judgment call by administrators and police. We’re always going to take it seriously, and the police will, too. If we err, we’re going to err on the side of caution.

“At the same time, we’ve got to be reasonable. One of the things we learned is that mistakes were made when all campuses went into lockdown. There was some misunderstanding about who has the authority to call what campuses into a lockdown. All campuses were thrown into what we call a hard lockdown.”

Districtwide, students and teachers were locked in classrooms and told to assume a prone position.

“That was an error,” Beard said.

But hard lockdown at Smith was not an error, he said.

“But one of the things we learned is that because of the time it took to search for the gun, it was very uncomfortable for teachers and students who were locked in their rooms at Smith. Therefore, we’re going to develop a new, intermediate lockdown procedure called soft lockdown that we can move to quicker.

“We didn’t have it in place [Wednesday]. For that reason, several students and teachers had to be pretty uncomfortable for a long time. In soft lockdown, students will be allowed to sit at their desks and watch television but remain in rooms until they’re released.

“The next level that we already have in place, and that the police moved us into, is a perimeter lockdown. No one is really in danger, but it controls the entry and exit of students. So, we will have three levels of lockdown in the future. We should have gone into perimeter lockdown with those campuses near Smith. Gerard [Elementary] went into full lockdown. At the worst, they should have been in soft lockdown, which we didn’t have in place yet.

“There were lots of lessons learned, and lots of good things happened.”

Assistant principal Darrell Boedeker was the only administrator on duty at Smith when the gun sighting was reported.

Principal Bill Allen was in training in Fort Worth. Assistant principal Janet Helmcamp was in a meeting at Central Office. Allen and Helmcamp returned to Smith soon after.

“Darrell was great,” Allen said. “He spoke to the two girls and called the [resource officer] at Wheat Middle School because our SRO was in training with the city. Darrell and the SRO decided they had information that constituted a threat, and Smith went into lockdown.

“The unique thing is that when we get reports from students, we usually get a pretty positive ID. In this case, the two girls didn’t know the other students. The description they gave would have fit 100 boys on campus that day. That made it a little more difficult to take control of the situation.”

In retrospect, Beard said, “It was a great training exercise. We lost a lot of instruction time and put a lot of people in a lot of fear. It was legitimate. It was handled the way it should have been on the Smith campus. But we did learn a lot of things we’ll be better at in the future.”

Beard heaped praise on the Smith staff.

Boedeker and Helmcamp “knew what they were doing, and they were professional at all times. And when Mr. Allen got there, they all performed like true veterans,” Beard said. “They may not have done it before, but you couldn’t tell it. To his credit, Mr. Allen drove back from Fort Worth, even though we said, ‘No, you don’t have to come.’ But he was going to come. I understand that.”