DES MOINES, Iowa — Des Moines Public Schools (DMPS) has announced new school safety measures for the 2024-25 academic year.
The news comes less than two weeks after a school shooter in Georgia killed two students and two teachers. There have also been multiple school threats in the Des Moines metro area over the past few weeks as well.
Some of the improvements Des Moines Public Schools have made include:
- Impact-resistant films that delay unauthorized access to school buildings, providing more time for emergency response.
- DMPS also added four people to its Public Safety Department, hoping it will lead to faster response times at its middle and high schools.
- Enhancing entryways at every building, ensuring there is only one way to enter school buildings.
- Artificial-intelligence video surveillance to detect things such as weapons, trespassing and crowd formation inside schools.
- All schools will also have one-touch emergency radios to send notifications to emergency responders in the event of a threat or potential active shooter situation.
"We're looking to bring some consistency on both the use of the language around how schools might respond to an event outside the ordinary, and then most importantly how they respond to those events," said DMPS Communications Director Phil Roeder. "A lot of it is small things but they can be very important things."
Visit these following links for a full list on the district's school safety protocols and the improvements it has made for this year.