During a fight between West Po students on April 23, one was stabbed multiple times and sent to the hospital in worrying condition. The injured student has been reported stable and the assailant is anticipated to be charged with malicious wounding.
OpenGate weapons detection devices were implemented on campus on April 24, but were removed after the first period. On April 30, Ms. Statz announced over the school’s speaker system that the weapons detection system would be implemented for the remainder of the school year. Every morning since, students have lined up outside doors 1 and 19 to pass through the system for access to the building. Throughout the school day, visitors and students may only enter the building from door 1, where a weapon detection system is operated the entire day.
The pilot program OpenGate system was intentionally moved to West Potomac on April 24, according to Brian Lambert, Chief of Safety and Security. “We moved it Thursday to make sure that all of the students felt comfortable returning to school the next day… It made good sense to move it over, to try to give as much comfort to the students that we have tools in place and for them to be on the other side of it, to see our school is a safe place to be,” Lambert explained.
The Office of Safety and Security selected West Po as one of the first communities “to get acclimated to” using the OpenGate system. By testing the systems at different schools, the office hoped to give schools a chance to see how the procedure works. Ultimately, the goal is to see how a broader implementation might work, testing student population proportions to the quantity of devices and altering the methods of operation for efficiency. West Potomac and Thomas Edison High Schools were chosen to be permanent locations because they both “had some experience with it,” Lambert said.
Lambert described the change in the pilot program from randomized to permanent as part of the program’s intent to learn more about how using the system will work going forward. “The general point of the pilot is we want to crawl, walk, run. Already, in the places we’ve been, we learned something every day,” Lambert said.
FCPS Safety and Security Office employees are no longer operating the systems here. Instead, West Po employees manage it. “We wanted to see in the next phase of the pilot, what does it look like when we start to turn it over to a school?” Moving the operations to the school staff is one hope for the program due to the scale of the FCPS.
Overall, Lambert believes the system is being implemented effectively. “I’ll be honest, it’s actually gone better than I would have expected with the turnover to the schools,” he said.
Student Behavior and Administrative Response (SBAR) data collected by the Virginia Department of Education for the last three school years shows 10 reported incidents of weapons possessions at West Po last year, 7 incidents in 2022-2023, and 12 in 2021-2022. Comparatively, Edison reported 10 weapons possessions last year, 3 in 2022-2023, and 4 in 2021-2022.
FCPS has existing measures in place to help protect students and staff throughout the school day and year. Over the past few years, security vestibules have been constructed at school main entrances to help regulate access to the building. Every high school has a School Resource Officer. The Office of Safety and Security performs audits of a school’s security and safety materials every three years, checking that the school meets safety standards. School staff regularly review procedures as part of Crisis Management teams, going through tabletop scenarios and completing debriefings after critical incidents occur.
“We don’t just say, ‘Hey, we’re done, it’s over, pack up. Let’s hope it goes better next time.’ We get all the folks together to say, ‘Okay, what went well, what went poorly, what should we be working on in the future?” Lambert described.
A debriefing was confirmed to have taken place following the stabbing incident at West Po. Feedback towards the response of law enforcement and school staff has been varied in opinion, with some applauding the reaction time and actions of teachers and staff. Meanwhile others hold doubts.
Nooriyah Ahmad, sophomore, thinks things could have gone differently. “In the video, the guy is laying on the floor and everyone is recording. Security is nowhere to be seen,” she described.
She shares the opinion of several parents, frustrated on the day of the incident by their inability to pick up their children during the Stay Put, Stay Tuned status.
