After Student Brings Gun To HPHS, D113 School Board Discusses Security

HIGHLAND PARK, IL — School board members and administrators in Township High School District 113 sought to assure concerned parents and students that they are continuing to review security measures after a student brought a gun to Highland Park High School.

At a special meeting last week, board members were urged to implement metal detectors and armed security guards and accused of complacency on security issues.

"A student brought a gun to school. Nobody was shot, but why are we waiting until somebody does get shot and students do get hurt to really do something?" asked HPHS freshman Star Hall. "Like, why isn't there safety measures and maybe metal detectors and armed guards already there since the 4th of July shooting?"

Hall said some students remained too scared to go back to school. Her mother, Diana Plamisano, told the board it seemed as if the only reason not to use metal detectors at the school is the way it would look.

"We don't care if other people think that our school is trashy for having metal detectors," Plamisano said. "At least kids aren't going to be bringing guns in easily."

The April 4 incident triggered an approximately hard lockdown at the school that lasted nearly two hours, as students sent their families photos from inside barricaded classrooms, unsure if there was an active shooter at school.

"These kids shouldn't ever be in a predicament like that, but they are doing what they can in that moment to protect themselves," HPHS parent Jenny Harjung told board members. "They're doing their part. You guys need to do your part. You guys need to make them feel safe when they're at school."

According to police and district officials, the student who brought the gun to school left campus before the lockdown was imposed.

While city officials said there was "not a plot by multiple individuals to engage in violence" at the high school, they refused to say if they had uncovered a violent plot by a single person, citing a state law that prevents the release of juvenile court records.

Harjung, the mother of two students at the high school, said she felt as if she was failing her children, one of whom was researching bulletproof backpacks following the lockdown.

"I send my children to school every single day, not knowing what could happen. They're scared to go to school. I'm scared to send them to school," Harjung said. "And ever since the parade, I have been advocating for metal detectors and armed guards. I feel like our children are sitting ducks. Unless you've lived under a rock for the past how many ever years, you guys know what's been going on in this country, how many school shootings there've been."

The lockdown came nine months to the day after the mass shooting at last year's Highland Park 4th of July parade, where a Highland Park High School dropout is accused of murdering seven paradegoers and wounding 48 others in the shooting before escaping and driving to Wisconsin.

Minutes before the recent HPHS lockdown, students at the high school had walked out of class in an anti-gun violence protest, which came just over a week after a mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee.

District officials said they had implemented various new security measures following the parade shooting, including adding six new security positions. Additionally, school resource officers from the Highland Park and Deerfield police departments are assigned to their both campuses in the district.

Board President Ken Fishbain said he was proud of the students who informed staff about their armed classmate and of the way that police and district staff responded and grateful to have "recovery teams" in place.

"As a school district, we're doing our part. We're investing resources on special trauma counseling service, investing in additional security, ongoing updates to protocols, coordinating with police, the other things are in the hands of the other legislatures," Fishbain said.

Fishbain said the board had supported the Protect Illinois Communities Act, the statewide ban on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines currently facing challenges in state and federal courts.

"So what's next? The board will continue to demand that our local, state and federal elected officials impose strict gun legislation," the board president said. "We also continue to review and revise our district security measures to ensure a safe learning environment for our entire District 113 community, staff and students."

Superintendent Bruce Law said educational professionals did not get into the business to be focusing on safety and security, yet this is the nature of living in the United States in 2023.

"We are dealing something at our doorstep. The origin of that is outside our walls. It comes at our schools, in our schools — and not just District 113, not just Highland Park High School, this is every school in the United States is facing this," Law said.

"I don't want us ever to lose sight of the fact that the real solution is outside of our school. The school is dealing with it once it comes in our door, but outside the school, before it gets to us, that's really where the solution is," he said, suggesting that if federal lawmakers are unable to agree on a solution to Daylight Saving Time they are unlikely to figure out gun violence, even as the country needs to "drop everything and figure this out."

Board vice president Anne Neumann said she was at Deerfield High School during the lockdown. She emphasized the importance of prioritizing mental health to reduce the risk of school shootings.

"Every single expert that has talked to us, and the research that I personally have done, as I'm sure my fellow board members have done, we know the majority of school shootings are from current students or past students. The way to prevent that is by students feeling they have a place where they belong, where they feel they have a community," Neumann said. "That is the preemptive step."

Board secretary Dan Struck said the board needed to do a rigorous self assessment to figure out what went right and what went wrong in the April 4 incident.

"We are facing an epidemic. We're facing a sickness in our society, tragically, and we're not the experts in it. There are think tanks, there are foundations, there are government agencies that've been looking at these issues for 20 years now, that we need to look to their guidance, we need to understand what is most effective in security," Struck said.

Schools need to be places where students can be comfortable and engage with one another, he said.

"As a school district, we need to look at equity, at the fact that there are students who don't feel the same way as a lot of us might, who have different experiences," he added. "That needs to be taken into account as well."

Board member Jaime Barraza said he appreciated how frustrating and aggravating it was for parents to be restricted from getting the full story due to privacy laws. He assured parents that board members would do anything they could to improve safety.

"It breaks my heart that we have to say how proud we are of the normalizing of this response. It's not OK. And we can't lose sight of how not OK this is," Barraza said.

"I wish I didn't know as much about school shootings as I do. I wish I didn't know as much about COVID as I do," he said. "But we do."

Board member Jody Elliott-Schrimmer, a teacher at Evanston Township High School — where the board and administrators decided against the addition of metal detectors after multiple incidents involving students bringing guns to school — thanked the community for their emails about security to the D113secure@dist113.org address established after the lockdown.

"We have to maintain a level of, I'd say, composure and also thoughtfulness and evidence-based practice so we can make decisions that are going to make our students and the adults in the building safe, and not necessarily showing our cards to whomever might decide to try to harm the people that we care about," Elliott-Schrimmer said.

"I hope that the community can come to a place of trust and understanding that we do care deeply, and we are working tirelessly to make sure that our students and teachers feel safe," she said.

The superintendent said the board would continue to consider whether metal detectors were a good idea.

"When it comes to metal detectors, we've done research, we continue to do research," Law said.

Research on the effectiveness of metal detectors in high schools is mixed. On the one hand, they can offer an effective deterrent and provide a quick response, but they can also generate false alarms, be detrimental to the climate of the school and be expensive to acquire and maintain.

A review of the research published in the Journal of School Health found insufficient data to determine whether metal detectors reduces the risk of violence, with some studies showing it decreased students' perception of safety and another indicating it reduced the chances of students bringing guns to school.

While the superintendent and several board members pledged to keep researching the issue, none of them expressed support for adding metal detectors any time soon.

At last week's special meeting, Law suggested it was inappropriate to discuss the pros and cons of metal detectors in public.

"We continue to do this homework, we continue to do this research," Law said.

"The frustrating thing I know is when we start talking about the capabilities of this particular system or that system —its success rate, its false positive rate — all those things that go into these deliberations, unfortunately that's not going to be in open session," he said. "Because in the future, if we go with a system, all its capabilities and all its shortcomings those things we don't want out in public."

Earlier:

• Student Charged With Having Gun At Highland Park High School
• Tips About Gun At High School Led To Lockdown, 5 Students In Custody
• HPHS Students Share Stories Of Mass Shooting With Senator Duckworth