By Adam Pagnucco.
In today’s school board meeting, MCPS Superintendent Thomas Taylor reported to the board that there were more than 4,000 “serious incidents” at the district’s schools in the 2023-24 school year. While his memo does not contain longitudinal data on prior years, Taylor writes, “This is the first of the safety and security updates to the Board of Education. It is important that we consistently are discussing our efforts as a district to create a school environment that is conducive to learning. I firmly believe these conversations will increase confidence and trust from our stakeholders about MCPS’ commitment to addressing safety and security needs in the district.”
Taylor goes on to elaborate:
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Per MCPS Regulation COB-RA, Incident Reporting, MCPS defines a serious incident as one that includes some level of risk, harm, threat of harm to staff or students, seriously disrupts school operations, or concerns staff or students and could escalate to a community concern or elevated to a police or legal matter.
During the 2023–2024 school year, there were a total of 4,424 incidents reported through Synergy, the student information system. Of the reported incidents, 726 (16%) were classified as critical, having the potential to impact student safety and security. Such events were classified within categories such as knives or other weapons, false alarms or bomb threats, fighting or attacks on students or adults, drug-related issues, and trespassing.
Though defined as a serious incident in Synergy, it is important to note that the remaining 3,698 (84%) reported incidents were determined to be non-critical, posing no threat to student safety and security and not requiring the activation of school-based emergency protocols at times. Such non-critical events range from a small animal entering the school to a temporary power outage resulting in the use of an automatic generator. Though these incidents are deemed non-critical, they are reported through Synergy to ensure the proper documentation of occurrence, and to ensure that the event is rectified in a manner that has no disruption to school-based operations.
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An attachment to Taylor’s memo contains the following data on the nature of these incidents.
MCPS deserves credit for releasing this information. Now that these numbers have been assembled and made public, the district’s security planners have benchmarks against which to evaluate the success of security measures. This is a sign of improvement in MCPS.