Winston County Working Together For Students’ Safety

WINSTON COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – Recent school shootings across the country have schools and law enforcement agencies wondering how they can better protect their students.

That’s why the Winston County Sheriff’s Department is working with schools in the area to find the answer.

“We want to be up on the game, on our game, in case something does happen,” says Winston County Chief Deputy Keith Alexander.

Winston County Sheriff Deputies, Louisville Police Officers, and Mississippi Highway Patrol Troopers are walking the halls and touring the entire campus of Nanih Waiya Attendance Center.

“If the principal calls and says, ‘we’ve got an active shooter,’ let’s just say in the gym, or at the field house, or in certain areas of the school, we need to know where to go to. We don’t need to be running around and saying, ‘oh, is it over here? Is it over here?’ We need to know exactly where to go because every minute counts, every second counts.”

How quickly the school and first responders react and the way they react is very important if this situation were to ever unfold.

“We need to know if the door opens from the inside, the outside, if we have to breach that room, if we’re going to have to force it outward to us, or if we can just kick it and try to make it go in. We need to know those different things.”

They also need to know these things, because these officers would be the ones responding in case of an active shooter.

Nanih Waiya Attendance Center has almost 600 students and their safety is the school’s number one priority.

“We have to keep in mind that all of the agencies that are going to be coming to help us, may not know where are our gym is, so today was so crucial to our safety, you know, with our number one priority having it to be a safe and orderly school, the fact that they now know which direction to go for our gym, our field house, our tech prep hall, where ever it may be, there’s some idea out there now,” says Principal Belinda Swart.

Swart says the recent school shootings have been an eye opener and caused them to revisit their safety plans and add different measures.

“You can’t think of every scenario, so when we can get all of the agencies to come in together and collaborate and work together and maybe they can think of some things that we haven’t thought of. I will say that it is on the teacher’s mind, it’s on all of our minds, and so they’ve got some great ideas. They’ve researched a lot of things.”

Alexander says deputies are also trying to educate parents on what they need to do and where they need to go if there is a school shooting.

The officers also toured three other schools in the area.