When a gunman shot and killed 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, Mike Roberts, Pleasant Grove’s current police chief, had an idea to increase police presence and protect children in schools. Just a couple of weeks after that tragedy, police officers with the department began the school walk-through program. Now, ten years later, the program is still going strong.

“We started doing it right after what happened at Sandy Hook. We do it for a couple of reasons. The first and foremost is we want to have a presence in our schools. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough officers to put a school resource officer in every school. If we had enough resources, we would put a cop in every school in town,” Pleasant Grove Police Captain Britt Smith said.

Patrol officers go to every school in the city every day, varying when they have their walkthroughs. “If someone were to plan to attack the school, they might think twice if they know officers come every day,” Smith said.

Another benefit of having a police presence at the schools so often is that the children get to know the officers. “They pull the police car right in front, walk through the school, put their heads inside the classrooms, wave to the kids. Sometimes, they might show up and play basketball and hopscotch,” Smith said

The second reason they do walkthroughs is to learn the layouts of every school. In case of an emergency, the officers will already be familiar with how the school is arranged and locations of the important rooms.

Smith said that faculty and staff members at the schools like the program. “We have to partner with the schools. That way we have a working relationship with the faculty. They like having us there. We have had zero negative reaction to this,” he said.

School safety

“We’ve had enough school shootings in this county that we should be responding to that and be prepared for that. We have active shooter drills. But we also really need to be proactive about our children’s safety,” Smith said.

A simple way to do that is to lock the danger out. Smith said that all doors and windows in schools should be locked at all times. He added that schools should have only one entrance or exit point, and that visitors are required to sign in at the front office.

Smith acknowledges that a perpetrator could still break into the school, but it will be much more difficult. “We don’t want to make it easy for these people. It’s unfortunate that we’re in a day and age that this is a reality, but it’s here. It’s a challenge that we have to face,” he said.

In addition to being vigilant about locking doors and windows, school personnel can be trained to be aware of suspicious behavior and to recognize warning signs in students.

“Safety is not convenient. It’s not convenient to put a helmet on. It’s not convenient to put a seatbelt on, But we do it to keep ourselves safe,” he said. “In order to have safety at our schools, we have to compromise some conveniences that we have.”