An Albuquerque student advisory council has made safety a primary concern as the opening of the school year approaches.
An Albuquerque Public Schools superintendent student advisory council is a committee of students who list their concerns to district officials, according to an Aug. 3 KOB 4 news report. APS has already taken steps to make safety a priority.
“What I can assure people is that APS is at the forefront of actually trying to deal with this,” APS Superintendent Scott Elder told KOB 4. “We’ve put in a lot of fencing. We’ve been doing vestibules. We’re doing the Ring system. We’ve been doing that for a number of years.”
What is new is the FBI providing training for educators in the state on how to identify students who might be troubled, KOB 4 reported.
“This training, specifically, is to show the red flags,” Ruben Marchand Morales, an assistant special agent with the FBI, told KOB 4. “To identify students having problems before we were participating in training to prepare the schools on how to react to an active shooter. Now we are taking the time to look at the red flags and how to provide assistance to these students who are having problems.”
The issue is a priority in light of the shooting last May at Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered at an elementary school, and a shooting a year ago at Washington Middle School in Albuquerque where a 13-year-old was shot and killed by a lone assailant, according to KOB 4.
“So going into this year, I think it's school safety. We’ve had a lot of discussion about protocols and if students are fully aware of that,” Erica Ho, an APS student who is a part of the superintendent council, said in the news report.
APS began training Aug. 3 in preparation for the Aug. 10 back-to-school date, according to KOB 4.
