ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. – The school board for Orange County Public Schools held a workshop Tuesday to discuss their safety program and, in the wake of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, board members had a lot of questions regarding their policies.
School Board Chair Teresa Jacobs started the conversation.
“I’m going to use the term errors were made, I think that is safe to say at this point in time,” Jacobs said.
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Board member Angie Gallo said she’d like to see the district’s policy include language to make it so that the school safety specialist is a law enforcement officer.
“A certain level of expertise that would be required to do this job, that I believe should only be done by a law enforcement officer,” Gallo said.
Other board members, like Johanna Lopez, wanted to make sure their policy is up to date.
She said the types of drills currently used in schools are the drills that were in place when she was an educator.
Lopez called for there to be further discussion, possibly in the form of another session on the matter, to more thoroughly discuss the policies in place when it comes to school safety.
Safety in schools is top of mind for many districts, not just Orange County.
News 6 spoke with Principal Jordan Rodriguez of Seminole High School, who’s retiring in September.
“This issue continues to be a reoccurring issue in our country. We obviously dealt with our incident where we had a shooting on campus earlier this year,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez said following the shooting at their school on Jan. 19, when police said 16-year-old Da’Raveius Smith opened fire inside the hallway, hitting 18-year-old Jhavon McIntyre, they’ve made changes.
He told us they’ve since upgraded their surveillance and have added an additional team member to their security team.