With several school safety topics listed on the agenda, gang activity and parental responsibility created the most buzz among a multi-agency roundtable dialogue on Tuesday.
For the second year, Lenoir County Schools hosted its Round Table Discussion on School Safety at the Central Office Board room.
Last year, a couple of safety manuals were produced and distributed from points made during the conversation with the law enforcement, fire and rescue, and emergency services agencies in Lenoir County.
“We didn’t just meet and sit down,” Lidia Guzman, LCS public information officer, said, mentioning school safety procedures and gang awareness manuals produced from the previous roundtable. “Our meeting last year was not in vain, and we look forward to doing the same thing.”
Since last year, schools have been in touch with Lenoir County law enforcement agencies about suspicious or mischievous activities on campuses, with several students having been identified as gang members.
“We are having some encounters with them,” said Kinston Department of Public Safety Sgt. Dennis Taylor about a Kinston gang with over a dozen teenage members suspected between the ages of 14 and 17. “There are females in this gang and they are actively doing things across the city.”
He said members may attend Kinston and North Lenoir High Schools and the Sampson Alternative School.
“We are monitoring it the best we can,” Taylor told some 60 attendees.
LCS Superintendent Steve Mazingo said this isn’t the first time youth gangs have been addressed.
“It’s something we’ve discussed in a lot of different arenas,” he said. “This (roundtable) group (was) unusually large, and all of the players were here today. For the gang issue to come up, I think it certainly helped. We try to stay on top of that.”
Taylor said Tuesday’s meeting will spread the word about gangs in schools, but it’s crucial to raise parental awareness to aid in student safety.
“We have to contact the parents and get (them) involved in the school system,” he said. “We can bring all this to a head and get some closure behind this gang situation because there are incidents.”
District Court Judge Beth Heath, who often reviews juvenile gang-related cases, said gang members post their activities on Facebook while they’re actually in school and questioned how schools monitor Internet activity.
“They’re very good at getting around the security (of the computers),” Mazingo said.
At that moment, system principals unanimously murmured in agreement that students use mobile phones to surf social media sites while at school.
“Facebook is a nightmare,” E.B. Frink Middle School Principal Tina Letchworth said during the discussion. “They do know how to get around it, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Angela Bryant, Kinston High principal, said some students have reached a point where discipline — like school suspensions — no longer bothers them.
“They want to be suspended,” she said. “We want them to make better choices, but they aren’t scared of the consequences.”
An hour and a half into the meeting, KDPS Ofc. Woody Spencer offered a valuable suggestion.
“We’ve talked about everything else, but we’ve not talked about the parents,” he said.
Parents who neglect or contribute to their child’s severe mischievous behavior — including gang-related action — can be charged with a misdemeanor or mandated to attend parenting classes, according to Heath, who said gang-related cases didn’t start appearing until several months after she started as a judge in Lenoir County 10 years ago.
“It’s the parents, it’s not just (the children),” she said, citing examples of how even after parenting class options are presented, people still won’t cooperate. “They never want to go and they need it, (but) they’re too busy. Eventually, they finally realize they have to go.”
While the court has jurisdiction over some parents, LCS does not, but principals have taken matters into their own hands.
Northeast Elementary School Principal Kecia Dunn said she’s shown up to parents’ jobs and social outings because she couldn’t get in contact with them to address the need of a student.
“Parents are partners in education,” she said. “(Safety) is a collaborative effort and it starts at home.”
Other agencies in attendance pitched in their role to school safety, including better tracking for Lenoir County’s 140 school buses and finding funds to place resource officers in all schools.
“It’s going to take a collaborative effort of school administration, school teachers, parents, law enforcement and the entire community to come together and take this bull by the horns,” Rochelle Middle School Principal Nick Harvey said about student safety, especially as it relates to gangs. “I think it’s very important that it came up today. We have to protect our most precious resources: our children.”
Jessika Morgan can be reached at 252-559-1078 or at jessika.morgan@kinston.com. Follow her on Twitter @JessikaMorgan.
BREAKOUT BOX:
Agencies represented at Tuesday’s community roundtable discussion:
- American Red Cross
- Kinston Department of Public Safety
- Lenoir County Board of Education
- Lenoir Memorial Hospital
- Lenoir County Schools
- Lenoir County Sheriff’s Office