When Kris Hill and I started talking about potential series ideas that I could work on my thoughts immediately jumped to schools and school safety.

Keeping students and staff safe on school grounds has been a hot topic this year, a discussion that was thrust upon us in December after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut.

I was interning at the Tahoma School District that Friday in December and the shift in the mood and the solemnity at the district office was palpable as the news of the tragedy broke and the media was flooded with first reports and then the ongoing coverage.

We’re over six months out from that now and I found myself wondering what, if anything, had changed in Kent and Tahoma schools as a direct result of Sandy Hook. I also wondered just what exactly school safety looks like these days. I felt like I had a pretty good idea, after all I went to Kent Schools, I graduated from college not all that long ago, and last year I was at Tahoma. But even still I found myself learning new things about our schools as I sat down with heads of security and other members of school security teams.

After such tragedies talk inevitably shifts to things like banning backpacks, installing metal detectors and having more armed security on school campuses. Do those things really help make our schools safer? What can be done, realistically? What are we OK with as a community and what measures do we really want to take? How do we make those decisions?

Over the next two weeks we’ll be running two pieces on school safety — a look at what school safety efforts have looked like historically in our two districts, at what has driven change, how the philosophy of school safety in the districts has evolved, and where they stand today including district partnerships and what is done to prepare students and staff for a host of situations from fires and earthquakes to shelter in place and lockdown drills.

A couple themes I’ve come across in talking to folks for these stories is the importance of constant vigilance and community awareness – that is the power of knowing our own community and creating a culture of saying something when something feels amiss, not letting it go by.

That very well may be one of the greatest tools we have as a wider community for keeping our schools safe.

Look for part one of the series, Gun Free Zone, in the July 12 issue of the Reporter.