SYCAMORE – Taylor Miller is a senior at Sycamore High School. After seeing news coverage of mass shootings at schools since February and experiencing what turned out to be a false alarm at the high school a year ago, she said she personally has had a fear of not being safe at school.
Although Miller, 18, of Sycamore is graduating Sunday, she still has friends who will be at the high school next school year.
“I want to leave knowing that they’re going to be safe,” Miller said.
High school students talked about school safety with the Sycamore School District 427 Board during a meeting Tuesday evening at the Administration Building, 245 W. Exchange St., Sycamore.
Superintendent Kathy Countryman said school administrators have been talking with students such as Miller about school safety since the shooting in February at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and before hundreds of local students participated in walkouts about gun violence in March.
She said the committee was formed so students have a way to address safety topics from their perspective.
Jake Nienaber, also a senior at Sycamore High and also a member of the student-led committee that addressed the board, said he thinks a lot has been accomplished already since the committee regularly started meeting. He said a policy to require students to enter and exit two main doors was enacted Tuesday and requiring students to scan their IDs every time they enter or leave the school, with next steps being the enforcement of students not carrying around backpacks in the building and, to hopefully, implement a text message alert system.
Nienaber, 17, of Sycamore, said he also had safety concerns after hearing about more shootings happening after, including the shooting that recently happened during Dixon High School’s graduation practice.
“The best way to deal with that fear is to do something about it,” Nienaber said.
Miller said the committee also will key in on ways to keep a culture of kindness at the high school. She said the goal is to get more underclassmen involved in the committee during meetings this summer and taking a tour of the company that designs the school’s BluePoint security alarm system.
Board President Jim Dombek said there wasn’t a single thing that he disagreed with that the students mentioned during the meeting. He said students are the most aware of where weak points in security are and that the board appreciates the input from a student perspective.
Board Vice President Steve Nelson said to the students that he wanted to encourage them to remain activists on the issue no matter where they end up after graduation.
“It’s just as big of an issue there as it is here,” Nelson said.