Team unity — Training, teamwork strengthen school safety efforts
Two Weston County School District No. 1 staff members reported recent successes in safety responses at the Oct. 1 school board meeting.
Superintendent Brad LaCroix said the first safety crisis meeting of the 2025-26 school year covered routine topics, such as doors and windows security and radio communications, but a Newcastle police officer also gave what LaCroix called “a pretty decent awareness training” on recognizing substance abuse.
LaCroix told the News Letter Journal that the officer explained how to identify signs of impairment by observing a person’s eyes, when to contact law enforcement and what constitutes reasonable suspicion.
“The eyes really do tell the story on a lot of different things,” LaCroix told trustees.
The safety meeting also reviewed best practices regarding the use of drug-detection dogs, he said. The dogs require lockdowns so students and dogs are not in hallways simultaneously, LaCroix said.
He said law enforcement recently upgraded to a different kind of radio. School district staff radios must now first switch to the bus repeater channel so all personnel involved are able to hear messaging. The bus repeater channel has a lot of messages that police don’t need, such as bus stops for students and weather information, LaCroix explained. After tuning to the bus repeater channel, district staff tune their radios to the emergency communications channel, which is the one where they can communicate with law enforcement. Some school district radios will need to be updated, LaCroix noted.
Tyler Bartlett, the principal of Newcastle Middle School, praised kitchen staff for quickly adjusting lunch counts on Sept. 15, when district schools entered a precautionary lockout during a search for a runaway teen who reportedly abandoned a vehicle found in Weston County. Instead of feeding a scheduled 100 students, kitchen staff needed to feed 140 students that day, according to LaCroix.
A lockout keeps students inside while normal activities continue but restricts entry or exit from the building.
Students who are in eighth through 12th grades are eligible to earn open campus privileges for lunch, LaCroix told the NLJ, and Bartlett said the difference in lunch count was because he decided to keep all eighth graders on campus for lunch that day to be
extra cautious.
Unlike high school students, eighth graders are not allowed to have access to their cellphones during the school day, including during lunch time, Bartlett explained.
LaCroix said he wasn’t on campus that day, so he was pleased to see that everyone followed protocols, worked well together and remained safe.