A discussion about ongoing security planning during Pauls Valley’s school board meeting last week offered insight into how the district is coping as school officials work to restore a sense of security for students and staff following an April 7 incident in which an intruder armed with a gun entered Pauls Valley High School and fired shots before being tackled by Principal Kirk Moore. Moore and other school staff restrained the intruder until law enforcement arrived. Moore, who was shot in the leg, was the only one physically injured in the altercation.
Pauls Valley School Superintendent Brett Knight said during the school board’s May 13 meeting that the school district has spent the last several weeks working closely with the Oklahoma State Department of Education and the United States Department of Education to identify resources and develop a plan for how to move forward from the event.
Knight and other district officials have been meeting virtually at least once a week with a team at U.S. Department of Education that was formed following the Columbine school shooting in 1999 and works specifically with response and recovery from school violence incidents.
“They’ve been a tremendous help. They’ve dealt with these situations. They’ve dealt with what we’re experiencing,” Knight said, adding the response team has also been able to provide guidance and support regarding what comes next. “What do we do to move forward and do it in the best way we can, addressing safety while we’re still focusing on training for staff, and how do we deal with this as a community?”
Pauls Valley’s Assistant Alternative Education Director Laney Tibbs has been instrumental in those talks, according to Knight.
Tibbs said the district has found themselves in uncharted territory as they’ve had to deal with new and sometimes daily challenges following the April 7 situation. In working with OSDE and U.S. Department of Education, Tibbs said the district’s focus has been, “How do we ensure that our school district is safe and our people are safe?”
That task has involved more than just implementing additional safety precautions. It has also centered around restoring the sense of security that has been broken for students, faculty and staff and the community.
Knight said in talking with Renee Bradley, the school’s contact from the U.S. Department of Education team, it’s been suggested that though Pauls Valley’s situation on April 7 did not result in loss of life, it was potentially just as traumatic as if it had.
“Renee’s team, they’ve been at Sandy Hook. They’ve been at Uvaldi. They originated from Columbine. And she said, in some ways, what we've experienced is tougher than any of those situations. Because of the mental distress that's caused by ‘What if?’ She said because everyone in the community, every one of those kids, the teachers, the staff are going to ‘What if’ this thing. Not just for days, for months, but for years,” Knight said.
“And that the mental side of dealing with ‘What ifs’ can be a lot more destructive to your mental capacity, than dealing with something that did happen.”
The district has already started putting additional security measures in place, including restricting access points at all four of the school sites.
While all of the district’s sites have existing access control systems, which require visitors to be “buzzed in” by staff, administrators are looking at how to further improve security at those entry points. Part of that plan includes remodeling the entrances at the Intermediate School, Junior High and High School to mirror the entryway at the Elementary School, the district’s newest building.
That entryway includes an inner and outer door, with a vestibule in between. The vestibules would also have a service window where office staff can interact with visitors, without having to grant access into the main building.
“We would have to do some cutting at the Intermediate and at the Junior High to get those windows into the offices. Which is not a major deal, and that's something we can take care of this summer,” Knight said.
School officials are also exploring options for securing some of the open areas around the High School courtyard, including between the gym and the main building.
The district has also identified two grants that could potentially help with recovery, including training for staff and additional security measures to be implemented across school sites.
Tibbs said the district has applied for a $185,000 grant through a U.S. Department of Education program that helps schools recover from a violent or traumatic event where the learning environment has been disrupted.
If received, the grant will be used to fund a second school resource officer for the 2026-2027 school year.
Using a portion of the onetime grant to add a second SRO, allows time for the school district and the police department to plan that expense into their budgets for subsequent years.
A portion of the grant would also be used to replace and update classroom door hardware at the high school, so it is consistent from door to door, creating less chance of confusion during an emergency.
The largest portion of the grant would fund additional training and educational materials for the district’s faculty and staff.
A second grant opportunity through the U.S. Department of Justice would help pay for additional security measures.
Two things the district has looked into that could be covered by the grant are portable weapons detections systems that could be used to screen visitors entering school spaces for functions like concerts and music programs, awards banquets and sporting events, and updating the intercom system at the high school. Knight said currently the existing intercom system is not connected to some of the newer buildings on the campus, including the band building, ag building and alternative education building, which potentially hinders communication to those areas, especially in an emergency situation.
Toward the end of the discussion, school board members expressed sorrow that the school and the community has been forever changed by the events of April 7.
“The sad part of it is that the innocence is gone,” board member JR Jackson said. “It’s taken away and it’s affected every single child in this district. I mean, all the way down to the elementary school. And so, unfortunately, this is the new norm. There's no price that you can put on a kid’s life, on anybody’s life. “
“That's one thing we've talked about over and over,” Tibbs said. “How did we get to this point? But also, how do we not change who we are, our identity, and what we're trying to do every day, which is, as our mission states: to empower our students in an ever-changing world. We do not have to be bad to get better, and all we're doing is trying to make it better.”