Safety and Security

The Roanoke County Police Department / Roanoke County Sheriff's Office has dedicated school resource officers (SROs) to serve in every elementary, middle and high school including the Burton Center for Arts & Technology.  The SROs provide a daily police presence in our schools and help to address discipline and safety matters in the school.  In addition, other police officers, sheriff's deputies and fire/rescue members frequently stop by our schools to check in, greatly increasing the overall security presence at our schools.
 

We have numbered every exterior door at each of our school buildings.  These numbered doors will help emergency responders more easily and quickly identify which entrance to use in the event of an incident at one of our school buildings.  Further, we have coordinated our technology so that if there is an incident at a school, the police are immediately notified and instantly have on-scene access to our security resources.

We have installed buzzer and camera systems at every school’s main entrance so that anyone entering the school must first be buzzed in and then directed to the office to check in.  Visitors are then asked the nature of their visit.  Any visitor wishing to enter a school must use the main entrance – this is the only entrance that is accessible from the outside.  All other exterior entrances are locked from the outside.  In keeping with fire codes, these exterior doors can be opened from the inside and we have installed panic bar-style systems so the doors can be easily opened should there be the need for a rapid evacuation of the building.  Interior doors are locked at all times.

As a direct result of a recommendation from the School Safety Advisory Committee, the Roanoke County School Board has doubled the size of our mental health counseling staff at our secondary schools.  LIFE stands for Lead Individuals and Foster Empowerment with our students. LIFE Counselors seek to establish productive relationships with students, parents, staff, and community members. LIFE Counselors provide individual and group counseling to students as well as education on approved mental health, trauma, and substance topics to our students, staff, and parents. Our LIFE counselors also focus on prevention and intervention to promote academic, personal growth, and well-being.

We have been using cameras for many years to help monitor activity in our buildings.  We continue to add additional cameras inside our schools and also added additional cameras to our school buses.  Every bus now has at least three cameras to monitor activity and voices inside and outside the bus.  Please remind your children that video and audio are being recorded on the bus each day.  We want to reassure parents that these cameras are being used to ensure any disciplinary issues are resolved quickly and to monitor activity in our schools so that if there is someone in our buildings who shouldn’t be, we can quickly detect it and take the appropriate actions.

We have added interior vestibules at our main entrances to direct visitor traffic into the office and to add a further barrier between the outside and our school interiors.  These vestibules will force visitors to first check in and then go through the office to state their intentions and reasons for visiting the school.

We have moved away from hard keys to school facilities and instead have implemented an electronic key card access system.  With this system, access to the school may be restricted to certain times of day, depending on the employee’s regular duties.  With these cards, access can be changed instantly, should an employee ID card be lost or stolen.

Roanoke County Public Schools uses RAPTOR, an online emergency alert system that allows each staff member to initiate a mobile panic alert as needed to lock the school building down.  The moment a lockdown is initiated via RAPTOR, police and emergency responders are immediately notified and will respond, saving valuable minutes that could potentially save lives.  The system will also support the reunification of students and parents if a school is evacuated to another site.

Throughout our schools, we have installed visitor sign-in kiosks where visitors to our school will sign-in using either their driver’s license or their name and date of birth.  That information is then checked against the national sex offender registry to determine if any registered sex offenders are attempting to enter our schools, or if other individuals are attempting to enter that should not be permitted.  Should there be an issue, school administrators can take immediate action.

For many years, our schools have developed and maintained crisis plans to ensure that, should a crisis situation occur, staff are aware of what to do and what processes to follow.  These crisis plans are reviewed frequently and updated on a regular basis to include information about new types of situations.  Our staff are trained in conducting threat assessments and are trained in the run-hide-fight method when an emergency incident occurs.

Virginia law requires all school divisions to conduct lockdown drills each year.  Schools in Roanoke County conduct one drill in early fall and another in the winter of each school year.  As required by law, the school division will send advance notice to parents at least 24 hours prior to each drill.  As part of the drill, a lockdown announcement will be broadcast throughout the school.  Students and staff will practice their lockdown procedures.  We encourage parents to talk with their students about the importance of taking these drills safely and following all instructions.

With the growing prevalence of vape devices, we have installed vape and audio detectors in every student bathroom in each high school to help reduce or eliminate the use of these harmful devices in school.  These devices can detect when an abnormal amount of vapor is present in the bathroom and also monitors for spikes in the decibel level in the bathroom, which might be the result of an incident.  Additionally, cameras are located outside each bathroom (in the public hallway) that are connected to the vape detectors to identify who might be in the bathroom when an administrator is alerted for high vapor or decibel levels.

Each school has an established threat assessment team. This team will assess and intervene with individuals whose behavior may pose a threat to the safety of school staff or students consistent with the model policies developed by the Virginia Center for School and Campus Safety including procedures for referrals to community service boards or health care providers for evaluation or treatment when appropriate.   Often, reports of a concern from students, staff, parents or the community will initiate an investigation that could lead to a review by a threat assessment team.  This is why it's so important for anyone who sees or hears anything concerning to report it as soon as possible to school administrators or the police so we can try to address an issue before it can escalate into something worse.