De Soto and Festus school officials recently got welcome news that their districts received state School Safety Grant program grants to fund safety improvements at their schools.
The De Soto School District received a $250,000 grant, and the Festus R-6 School District got a $350,000 grant.
De Soto Superintendent Josh Isaacson said his district will use its grant to make safety and security improvements at all its campuses, with most of the money going toward video surveillance equipment.
Festus Superintendent Nicki Ruess said the Festus district will use its grant money to build on school safety improvements that already were in the works.
“This allows us to expedite our safety plans,” she said. “It will allow us to enhance safety in our entryways and our video surveillance. We’ll do equipment improvements like (purchasing) emergency medical bags for our buildings and AEDs (automated external defibrillators) so we will have one in every one of our facilities.”
Gov. Mike Parson signed off on a bill in February that made $20 million available to local education agencies to promote safety through school safety programs, physical security upgrades and associated technology in schools, like door locks, monitoring systems, bleeding control kits and automated external defibrillators.
The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education distributed the grants, notifying recipients on April 28.
One other county school district, the Northwest R-1 district, received a $450,000 grant through the program.
De Soto
Isaacson said the $250,000 his district received was the maximum allowed for a district with its enrollment.
He said he submitted the grant application on March 22.
“It’s good that they got back so quickly,” he said. “We hope to have everything in place, or at least mostly in place, by the time school starts again this fall.”
Isaacson said about $160,000 will be used to buy the video surveillance equipment.
“Currently, the only place we have video surveillance is at the high school, and it’s antiquated,” he said. “It’s about 20 years old and an analog system. They’ve made so many advances in the technology. For instance, you can tell it to focus on a specific person’s face and it will follow that person from camera to camera as they walk through the building.”
Isaacson said the first priority is to replace the high school system.
“We’ll go out for (requests for proposals) as soon as possible, and we’ll see how far that gets us,” he said. “Ideally, we’d like to get video surveillance in at all of our campuses.”
Another $75,000 will be used to improve access controls at all schools, including more secure doors, intercom and buzzer systems and more secure vestibules, Isaacson said.
“We’ve done a lot of work on our safety at our main doors, but the high school is different because the vestibule is a large, open area and the office isn’t immediately inside the front doors,” he said. “But I’ve got some ideas on how we can make that more secure. And I’m hoping we’ll have enough of that $75,000 left over to install keypads at each entrance of each building in the district.”
Isaacson said another $10,000 will be spent on security planning, staff training and bleeding control kits, and $2,500 will be used to install bollards, or posts, outside school building entrances. The final $2,500 will purchase safety film to be installed on exterior windows and sidelights.
“We’re very thankful that our community supports our efforts to improve safety and security at our schools,” he said, referring to Proposition Safe Schools, which De Soto district voters approved in April 2019 that allowed the district to shift 15 cents from the debt service fund to the general operations fund dedicated to school security.
“This generates about $300,000 a year, half of which is paid to our school resource officers,” Isaacson said.
The remainder has been used to complete various security improvements at all campuses, like improving classroom doors.
“I’d say about 90 percent of our interior doors have been replaced,” Isaacson said. “We also have video cameras on all our buses. This grant will go a long way to helping us stretch our Proposition Safe Schools money.”
Festus
Ruess said like De Soto, Festus will use its grant money to build on prior efforts toward improved school safety that voters had authorized.
In April 2019, Festus R-6 voters approved Proposition F, a 59-cent tax levy increase to help pay for school safety measures among a number of facility improvements, most notably the construction of its $14 million, 750-seat performing arts center that opened in 2022.
“Our community is so supportive,” Ruess said. “The community passed a tax measure to heighten our school security efforts. At that time, we added two additional SROs (school resource officers) to the two we had.”
Ruess said the district has continued to make safety improvements since then and the new state grant will allow the district to move up some other school safety projects that otherwise would have come later.
She said that as part of the entryway safety improvements, equipment will be installed so visitors to the buildings will be required to show identification before they can use the buildings’ keyless access-buzz-in systems to enter school buildings.
“The last enhancement will be a safety film on windows,” she said. “It’s not bulletproof, but bullet-resistant.”
The money also will help with safety training, Ruess said.
“We will continue our tiered-level training for all of our staff,” she said.
Ruess said she expects safety construction projects to begin after classes end in a few weeks.
“We’ll start work this summer,” Ruess said. “We receive the grant money at the end of May, is what we’ve been told.”
She said the grant money definitely helps the district.
“We are very appreciative of the support from the governor and DESE to continue with school safety measures,” she said. “Our students should come to school and focus on learning. It’s our job to make sure they’re safe while they’re here.”