An exterior view of the Clark County School District administrative offices Tuesday, March 29, 2022.
Wednesday, April 13, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Educators throughout the Clark County School District will soon have classroom panic buttons at their disposal, a resource officials say could have prevented the alleged sexual assault and attack that left a teacher critically injured last week at a northeast Las Vegas high school.
The incident was the latest in the intensifying violence toward school officials across the valley, bringing urgent pleas from teachers for more classroom protections.
Superintendent Jesus Jara said at a news briefing Tuesday that he spoke to the vendor of one of CCSD’s safety alert systems to expedite placing new buttons throughout the district, starting with high schools, then middle schools and elementary schools.
Eldorado High School, where the teacher was attacked in her classroom April 7, would be the first to get the panic buttons.
The SAFE (Signal Alert For Education) System outfits staff with personal panic buttons they can use to notify first responders on everything from school shooters to medical emergencies. Once the button is pressed, the system sends the employee’s specific location to responders, and distress messages can be delivered to colleagues via text and email.
Educators already have direct communication with school police, such as radios that allow principals to patch into dispatch as an officer would, and a code that teachers can enter into their classroom phones that alerts police and puts the school on lockdown.
Eldorado staff used the radio to call for help after an employee found the injured teacher, CCSD Police Chief Mike Blackeye said.
The suspect, a 16-year-old boy, was arrested near his home about a mile from campus less than two hours after the attack. He faces 15 felony charges and is being charged as an adult.
“This was a brutal assault,” Clark County Education Association President Marie Neisess said. “The student came in and he attacked this educator, and he did so from the word go.”
The boy attacked the teacher from behind, strangling her and slamming her head into a table until she fell into unconsciousness, according to a report from Metro Police. He reportedly admitted to also sexually assaulting her.
A custodian later found the teacher still unconscious in her classroom with shelving and a filing cabinet on top of her, bloodied and partially undressed.
An attack like this had never happened before in CCSD, Blackeye said.
Neisess said this needed to be the beginning of the end of the intense, growing violence in CCSD schools. Additional surveillance cameras and panic buttons are vital, and she said the burden was on Jara and the School District to get them in place as soon as possible.
“This cannot wait one more day,” she said. “We must act now.”
She says she knows the next steps won’t have an immediate light-switch-like effect, “but we also know without these first steps, we will see more and, God forbid, worse stories like what happened last week in Eldorado.”
Surrounding police departments including Metro, Henderson Police and North Las Vegas Police, Blackeye said , will be more visible alongside CCSD officers after spring break. The six school-day break began with the end of classes Friday and continues through Monday.
Jara said campus video cameras eventually would be upgraded, too.
“The cameras, they’re outdated,” he said. “We are going to find the resources within the Clark County School District to protect our employees.”
Neisess said state legislators and Gov. Steve Sisolak need to reexamine and make appropriate changes to the restorative justice laws that were put in place in 2019 that made it harder for schools to immediately remove students for battering staff and fellow students.
She said restorative justice was an unfunded mandate that “handcuffed” teachers and administrators from taking action against violent students.
District officials announced late last month that it was expanding expulsion recommendations to include batteries against students and staff that lead to criminal citations and disturbances that have siginificant schoolwide impact.
Mike Barton, CCSD’s chief college, career and equity officer, said that regardless, restorative justice did not apply in this case.
“Let me make that very clear,” he said.
[email protected] / 702-990-8949 / @HillaryLVSun
