Nevada attorney general presents safe school plan

Attorney General Adam Laxalt on Thursday issued a series of recommendations to improve school safety.

The recommendations were generated in the March Law Enforcement Summit on School Safety and will be submitted to the governor’s Statewide School Safety Task Force and the Nevada Legislature.

He said the recommendations focus on seven major topics and includes some things that will require legislative action or long term planning.

“Our schools should be places of teaching and learning, not the site of violent crimes,” he said.

The proposals listed include:

Increase patrols by school resource officers, reducing response times for any incident or attack;

Enhancing the existing technologies for running background checks and criminal histories on suspects;

Modernizing safety features in schools including changes to floor plan designs;

Creating active-assailant training programs for law enforcement, teachers and students, establishing incident command procedures;

Evaluating potential threats to schools and improving communications between teachers, administrators and law enforcement. Establishing response plans for specific schools and improving training programs; and

Enacting laws to reinforce mental health services and strengthening the ability to evaluate and address potential threats, especially related to mental illness or domestic violence. That would include encouraging students to download the “SafeVoice Nevada” mobile app.

“I am confident that, if Nevada takes these important steps, our schools and children will be safer,” Laxalt said.

Laxalt told The Associated Press the question of letting teachers carry guns on campus should be left to individual school districts.

“I would not propose that we force anyone who doesn’t want to, to carry a gun,” he said.

Another recommendation was the Legislature next year should consider a “red flag” law to allow judges to approve petitions to confiscate guns from people found to pose a “serious and immediate threat of violence to themselves or others.”

His office couldn’t be reached to explain what those recommendations would cost to implement or where the money would come from.

But in the recommendations it was stated federal grants could fund expansion of a student tracking system more comprehensive than one already used in the Clark County School District. It would flag for administrators those students who pose “even a marginal threat of violence to other students and teachers.”