{"id":18158,"date":"2022-06-15T01:58:49","date_gmt":"2022-06-15T01:58:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=18158"},"modified":"2022-06-18T14:15:52","modified_gmt":"2022-06-18T14:15:52","slug":"are-valley-schools-safe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2022\/06\/15\/are-valley-schools-safe\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Valley Schools Safe?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Eric Valentine<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
Each member of the Ballis family is a staff or student of Blaine County School District. Photo credit: Officer Morgan Ballis<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If you could design a School Resource Officer job description checklist that could make parents, staff and students feel safer, it\u2019d go something like this:<\/p>\n

\u2022 Military training<\/p>\n

\u2022 Police training<\/p>\n

\u2022 Experience training police officers in K-12 safety<\/p>\n

\u2022 Educated in psychology with a master\u2019s degree in Emergency Management; and Ph.D. coursework under way<\/p>\n

\u2022 Life experience involving mass shooting<\/p>\n

\u2022 Children who attend a district school<\/p>\n

\u2022 Spouse who teaches at a district school<\/p>\n

Thanks to Hailey Police Officer Morgan Ballis\u2019 life and career, Blaine County School District can check all those boxes come August. That\u2019s when Ballis, who was hired by the City of Hailey in February, will begin the role he was brought onto the force to perform, school resource officer\u2014a school\u2019s first line of defense against a variety of ill will that has been making its way onto campuses all too often the past two decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was Sandy Hook that really hit home. That\u2019s when I knew I wanted to dedicate my life to this specifically,\u201d Ballis said, recounting the moment he heard about the Dec. 14, 2012, tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, when a 20-year-old shot and killed 26 people. Twenty of the victims were children between six and seven years old, and six were adult staff members.<\/p>\n

That was when Ballis was still in the Marines\u2014something he did for 11 years until leaving in 2015\u2014and around the same time his daughter began kindergarten and his wife began teaching. It was also just a year removed from a traumatic experience his family had while still residing in Tucson, where Ballis was born and raised.<\/p>\n

On the morning of Jan. 8, 2011, Ballis\u2019 mother headed to the supermarket to do some grocery shopping. She saw a large crowd of people out front and inquired about the event. It was a constituents gathering called Congress At Your Corner hosted by U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Ballis\u2019 mom was talking to two men, one of them was then future Congressman Ron Barber and another man who\u2014after a sudden series of gunshots\u2014was covered in blood.<\/p>\n

Six people died in the attack and another 13, including Giffords, were wounded. Ballis\u2019 mother escaped injury, but the entire family and their community couldn\u2019t escape the trauma of it all. For Ballis, his military training and his community\u2019s tragedy would begin to shape his fate.<\/p>\n

Prevention & Response<\/b><\/p>\n

Today, Ballis\u2019 community is the Valley, and his family has grown roots here quickly. His wife is a literacy coach at Ernest Hemingway STEAM School, his daughter attends Wood River High School, and his son attends Wood River Middle School, where last month the campus\u2014and the entire district\u2014went into lockdown when the popping of a balloon in a restroom was mistaken for a possible gunshot.<\/p>\n

Ballis was in training elsewhere that day, but he said the district\u2019s reaction and law enforcement\u2019s response to the potential emergency was perfect.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love that a teacher loves my son so much they didn\u2019t hesitate to call 9-1-1,\u201d Ballis remarked, adding that the teacher did the right thing by not checking with administrators first. \u201cThe one thing there\u2019s never enough of in an active-shooter situation is time. Staff and students need options other than waiting for law enforcement to show up.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s one of two critical areas of focus for Ballis in his new role\u2014to move the district from a lockdown-only response to an options-based response. Something he says Superintendent Jim Foudy has already started to adopt across the district. Already the state has performed a vulnerability assessment on every campus, and a district task force has gone to every site and collected data that will be used to establish policy and procedure at each campus, referred to as Targeted Attack Protocol (TAP).<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have leaders within this district and the community that are out in front of this issue,\u201d Ballis said.<\/p>\n

These protocols will cover everything from how students and staff can disrupt an active-shooting situation and self-evacuate, rather than be penned up in classrooms where they are easy targets for a shooter.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not teaching martial arts and we\u2019re not doing any drills that will cause additional trauma,\u201d a concept called trauma-informed practices, Ballis said<\/p>\n

The other mission-critical component to Ballis\u2019 work, he said, will be helping to establish a prevention element to a tragedy like this. Already a behavioral intervention team is being used across the district to identify students or staff or situations that may develop into a real threat or an extreme tragedy. Behavioral intervention teams are typically made up of administrators, school psychologists, social workers, and law enforcement, among others.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone communicates and everyone stays in their lane,\u201d Ballis said. \u201cMy feeling is that if we\u2019re at the point where there\u2019s a threat, we\u2019ve sort of already failed.\u201d<\/p>\n

In last month\u2019s lockdown there was another key takeaway, according to Ballis. Parents need to know their role in a crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey want to know what\u2019s going on and they want to help,\u201d Ballis explained.<\/p>\n

But in real-time, no-drill situations, parents on campus clog roads and driveways and make it harder for trained personnel to do their job.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s on us,\u201d Ballis said. \u201cWe have to communicate better.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Eric Valentine If you could design a School Resource Officer job description checklist that could make parents, staff and students feel safer, it\u2019d go something like this: \u2022 Military training \u2022 Police training \u2022 Experience training police officers in K-12 safety \u2022 Educated in psychology with a master\u2019s degree in Emergency Management; and Ph.D. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":18166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,72,74,76,78,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-18158","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-blaine-county","8":"category-community","9":"category-education","10":"category-emergency-services","11":"category-hailey","12":"category-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18158"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18180,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18158\/revisions\/18180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}