Vienna Superintendent discusses keeping Students and Staff Safe
VIENNA, IL. (KBSI) – We talked to Vienna school resource officer and superintendent about their efforts to ensure safety for their students and staff throughout the school year.
“The main thing for the public to know is 1 we take them very seriously.” Says Vienna superintendent Dr. Joshua Stafford, he discusses the measures the school takes to ensure safety for his students in the district.
Vienna is one of multiple schools dealing with repeated threats surfacing on social media.
The district saying after a thorough investigation that there is no credible threat to any schools or individuals.
Dr. Stafford says, “anytime we are handed a report or a tip of any kind of information like this we immediately engage as a school district all of the local law enforcement authorities, we even have a FBI field office out of Marion Illinois that we always notify of this as well.”
We also talked to a school resource officer at Vienna high school, Eileen Rochford. She tells us there is a team of resource officers that are on hand, and ready to protect at a moments notice.
Rochford says, “we make appearances at all of the grade schools that feed into high school. Our office is based at the Vienna high school and we have officers that sometimes serve at the grade schools all day.”
Dr. Stafford explains every threat is taken seriously by the school system. Dr. Stafford saying if you re-post a screen shot of a threat, it becomes harder for police to find the origin.
He pleads with parents and students to report, not repost, saying that only makes it harder to figure out where the image came from.
“It’s extremely important that if you come across something like that appears to be an education of a threat or is a threat right capture a screenshot of that and make sure you share that with the local school authorities, local law-enforcement appropriate authorities in your community.”
SRO officer Rochford doubles down on this take, saying they work around the clock to discover the origin of the post.
“Often times we find that post that arrive in one county originated maybe from another county sometimes it is something that is edited or changed before it gets to our county we spend hours tracking these things and the more opposed to share the harder it is for us to do our jobs.”
Dr. Stafford wanted to make sure parents remember that the safety of students and staff is their top priority, encouraging parents saying.
“If you see something say something to the appropriate authorities in your community school officials, law enforcement authorities, right call your local sheriff department police department whomever that is relay that information to them that’s an absolute do.”
He says he hopes they can move forward with classes this week refocusing on education, and a successful school year.
