A Clark County School District police vehicle sits parked in front of Desert Oasis High School Tuesday, March 22, 2022.
Thursday, March 24, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Desert Oasis High School junior Cristian Muehlhausen and his siblings endured two lockdowns in two days earlier this month, on a Wednesday and Thursday.
By that Friday morning, they didn’t want to go to school, and their families also feared for their safety and didn’t want them on campus.
“At the rate that we had been unraveling, it felt like there was going to be another issue coming up,” Muehlhausen said.
In the span of two weeks, families at the southwest Las Vegas school have worried as children have messaged them to report of hard lockdowns of the campus after reports of a student having a gun on campus, multiple brawls between groups of students, a parent being arrested for being in an altercation with a student, and lastly, a gun being confiscated in a separate incident from the first weapons threat.
In a hard lockdown, students and staff crouch quietly on the floor, away from doors in darkened, locked classrooms until given the all-clear signal, as occurred March 9 when a gun report was received. Campus police officers searched room by room for nearly three hours before they determined that there was no threat.
The incidents are unsettling to students, parents and staff.
“They need to go to school and feel safe, so that they can come out of survival mode and be in a productive cycle to help them get through school,” said Desert Oasis parent Cherish Morgan at a meeting she called this week to rally like-minded people to bring concerns and calls for tighter discipline before the Clark County School District School Board.
The parents are calling for enhanced security, including an increase of officers — generally, two CCSD Police officers are assigned to each high school — and backpack checks before anyone is allowed to enter campus.
CCSD Police routinely conduct random weapon searches. Just last week one was done at Cadwallader Middle School. In such weapons searches, classrooms are chosen at random as school staff and police using hand-held metal detectors check students and their bags. Some schools have their own hand-held metal detectors.
Other schools are also seeing an uptick in violent incidents.
The Sun analyzed calls to Clark County School District Police for violent crimes from the first seven months of the school year and found that of the 6,827 calls logged through February, 775 led to arrests and citations, mostly for fighting, assault and battery.
Not every call equals an actual incident. Many reports were closed as “gone on arrival” or “unable to locate.” Others were deemed “unfounded;” there are some misunderstandings, like a suspicious noise that sounded like gunfire or explosives but was not, CCSD Police Chief Mike Blackeye told School Board members earlier this month.
Some incidents were handled by school staff without further police involvement. And about 350 students were referred to counseling for lower-level offenses.
It’s unclear from the dispatch logs how many calls involved student-on-student violence, staff as victims, or if the people involved were connected to the school at all.
But where assaults did happen, young suspects are colder and more violent, said Brigid Duffy, chief of the juvenile division for the Clark County district attorney’s office.
“The violence is way more intense and the empathy is absolutely lacking among human beings,” she told trustees at a March 10 meeting where they got an overview of school disturbances.
School violence spiked following the school closures in 2020-21 brought on by pandemic, when students learned in a remote setting away from the structure of in-person learning.
“Children need structure, and school provided that,” said Katherine Lee, a nationally certified school psychologist and an assistant professor in school psychology at UNLV. “(Are they acting out) to get attention? Is it because there’s an underlying mental health issue? Is it because they feel like they’re struggling so much in school? Are they mad at the school or feel like they don’t belong?”
Viral videos over the last few weeks illustrate the brutality, like at Cheyenne High School, where a girl brought a teacher to the ground in an argument over a cellphone charger and kicked her until classmates pried her off, and at Las Vegas High School, where a girl beat a classmate into unconsciousness at her desk.
Superintendent Jesus Jara said violence in schools mirrored increased aggression throughout society, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.
“We cannot allow anything other than kindness and understanding to guide our interactions with one another,” he said during his March 11 State of the Schools address. “Our patience has been tested over the last 24 months, and we’re tired… But we have to do better. We cannot allow violence in our schools.”
Rashonda Harper said she followed her son’s social media accounts and saw the videos he has posted of melees at Canyon Springs High School, where he is a student, even before the school has made an official announcement.
Parents are discouraged from coming to campus when administrators call a lockdown. Harper does it anyway. Her son asks her to come because he’s scared.
“They’re not safe at school, and school should be safe,” she said.
Victoria Muehlhausen, Cristian’s stepmother, said her children were also afraid.
“My kids have never expressed any fear of going to school until this spring,” she said. “I just want to get them through.”
Cristian Muehlhausen described trying to keep a friend who has an anxiety disorder from panicking as a siren blared every few minutes over the public address system during the first lockdown, March 9.
“The alarm going off and us not being aware of the situation just makes it a whole lot worse,” he said. “It’s a stressful situation, because you don’t know exactly what’s happening and not everybody’s going to be able to tell you the facts. It’s all a bunch of rumors at first. And they can go from zero to 100.”
He was in his crime and justice class at the time.
His stepsiblings, twins Lakoa Mahana and Lanakila Heaukulani, were on their lunch period at the time, so they were held behind the gates of the cafeteria. Lakoa Mahana said all the windows made him nervous that he was exposed to danger from outside. Lanakila said she wondered if the person thought to have the gun was locked in with her.
“I would like to go to a different school,” she said softly.
The next day, March 10, a parent is alleged to have come onto campus and fought students as other students fought each other. It wasn’t the first fracas that day, but it did lead to 11 arrests and citations and another lockdown.
On Friday morning, March 11, police intercepted a student who had allegedly posted on social media about bringing a weapon to Desert Oasis. Although he was found to be unarmed, police cited him for his threats. Then last week, a student brought a gun to Desert Oasis. That student, too, was arrested.
A junior at another CCSD high school, who asked to remain anonymous, said the fights his freshman year were “petty” squabbles arising out of rumors. This year, he said, the fights are darker, motivated by drugs, gangs and racial animus. He said he’d seen guns in backpacks and waistbands, but he hadn’t told adults on campus.
The boy said he was “numb” as he moved through his school day. What he describes sounds like putting up mental walls to block out chaos. He said he’s not scared to go to school, but “I’m scared for my freshman friends.”
He said his school could be better, with more and better teachers and rules that are applied evenly — and updated textbooks.
But he swiftly points out that “safer” shouldn’t be part of making a school better. Safety should be a given.
“School shouldn’t be a dangerous place in the first place,” he said.
