NATCHEZ —Adams County Sheriff’s Office deputies were called to Natchez High School Friday morning — the last in a series of calls high school administrators have made in recent weeks.

Sheriff Travis Patten said his deputies have been called to area schools almost every day in the past week, and many of the calls are to break up fights.

Though Patten said Natchez High School is by no means the only school to which deputies are called, Patten said his deputies have answered several calls there in recent weeks.

“I cannot talk about any one particular incident,” Patten said. “But lately, these kids seem to be fighting every day.”

School administrators declined to comment on the incident Friday morning that drew four sheriff’s deputy cars to Natchez High School before 9 a.m., but did share their feelings on the Feb. 20 threat that caused a school-wide lockdown.

In the midst of any school threat, Natchez-Adams School District Superintendent Fred Butcher said his first thought is for the safety of his students.

Those fears are exacerbated, he said, by the difficulty in securing the physical structure of the high school.

The problem is, Butcher said, society has changed since Natchez High School was built in 1961.

“At the time the school was designed, society was not experiencing the same things we are as a society,” he said. “With the recent school shootings, everybody’s on edge. Students are on edge. Teachers are on edge. The things that we used to see on TV, those things are on our doorstep now.”

A school shooting is defined in this article as an incident in which a gun was fired at a school and one or more people were injured or killed.

In the decade prior to the construction of the high school, 1951-1961, only 21 school shootings occurred in America.

Each of these incidents was ruled either accidental or only involved two to four people. Most shootings — though tragic — were simply quarrels gone wrong.

The concept of a mass school shooting was relatively unheard of in 1961.

Charles Whitman, broadly considered to be the first mass school shooter, killed his mother and wife before going on a shooting rampage  at the University of Texas in 1966, five years after Natchez High School was constructed. Whitman shot and killed 11 and injured 31 during the rampage. One victim died from the injuries years later.

In the last decade, from 2008-2018, approximately 154 school shootings have occurred across the nation.

While many of these incidents are similar to those of the 1950s — accidental gunfire and disputes turned deadly — the decade also includes the Marshall County High School shooting in Kentucky, in which 20 people were shot and two died, the Umpqua Community College shooting, where a gunman killed eight students and one teacher in Roseburg, Ore., and, of course, the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School that claimed the lives of 26 children and adults.

And, of course, Parkland.

Not only has the number of gun-related incidents risen drastically in the years since Natchez High School was constructed, the nature of the threat has evolved.

And these are only examples of gun violence — the amount of school violence, Patten said, is also growing.

“We do a lot in support of all schools, public and private,” Patten said. “But these children have to learn to respect their teachers. They don’t need to go to school to settle beefs, turf wars or fights. They need to go to school to learn.”

Butcher said the way in which the school was designed does not lend itself to easy protection.

Natchez High School’s design is similar to a cluster of grapes. Each pod or classroom is connected to the other by a series of awnings and overheads, but not enclosed.

This structure, Deputy Superintendent Zandra McDonald said, leaves too many access points on campus.

This both means someone from the outside can access the interior of the school and means that monitoring all students — to break up fights or prevent tensions from escalating — is difficult.

Add to this the large, glass windows that wall each classroom, and a potential threat has access to dozens of students at once.

As the town has grown, more and more people are near the school on a daily basis.

“When that school was built, you didn’t have Walmart across the street,” Butcher said.  “It was in an isolated area, which was a good idea. The city has grown, and now it’s one of the busiest areas in town.”

Since the area is not enclosed, the proximity to the public makes Butcher wary of intruders, he said.

As the threat to students has changed in the past 50 years, so, too, must evolve student protection, Butcher said.

“This is one point we’ve continued to try to bring out as we talked about the need of a new school,” he said. “When we talk about the need for a new school, safety is the main factor.”

New school

The planned high school is designed in a more traditional structure, with one primary hallway and multiple rooms lining the walk.

This space, which has defined entry and exit points, McDonald said, would be easier for security resource officers and administrators to control.

“Currently at the high school, there are multiple access points,” McDonald said. “A new facility would be enclosed and there would be access points where someone would have to grant a visitor access into the building, to our students, and to our staff members.”

Having controlled entry and exit points, like any medical or government facility, would also allow a more acute sense of safety for students, she said.

“Students will feel safer in an enclosed area, and administrators will be able to monitor them,” McDonald said.

McDonald said the enclosed space will not only benefit students in the event of a school shooting — the new building would increase security for everyday threats.

When looking at the many schools in which incidents of mass casualty have occurred, however, the design of many of those school buildings favored the proposed design of the new Natchez High School.

In Parkland, Fla., for example, Florida Sen. Bill Nelson told news outlets the shooter set off a fire alarm so that students would flood the primary hallway, where “the carnage began.”

McDonald said she was aware the new high school was not the quintessential solution for school security.

Instead, McDonald said she believed an enclosed, easily monitored school would be the foundation on which a strong security system could be built.

“We understand there can be breaches in any facility, but we want to ensure we are strengthening our security when it comes to access students have outside of the building, and that our public has inside of our buildings,” she said.

Though he believes the new high school may go a long way toward student security, Butcher said he has no intention of waiting until the new structure is built to increase security.

We cannot wait

Following the lockdown on Feb. 20, Butcher, McDonald and other school leaders met with members of the Adams County Sheriff’s Office and the Natchez Police Department to talk about school security.

Following the consultations with law enforcement, Butcher said he is busy preparing new safety plans for all schools in the county.

“We plan to take a new safety plan to the board in perhaps the May meeting, maybe even in the April meeting,” he said. “If it’s approved, there are some things we are going to make an effort to put in place. We are not going to wait until we build the new school.”

Part of the upcoming plan, Butcher said, will attempt to tackle an age-old problem in education: parental involvement.

“No matter what we build, we have to have a network with parents and students,” he said. “At this day and time, students receive more information than anybody on social media.”

The problem is, Butcher said, much of the information is wrong.

At the lockdown, several parents received texts from their children or saw messages posted to Facebook or Twitter.

Many, many of the rumors floating in the social media ether were misinformed, McDonald said.

“There is a lot of information in our community that is erroneous,” McDonald said. “A lot of our time is spent now in informing parents on what is factual.”

If a strong bond can be built between parents, teachers and administrators, Butcher said parents can begin helping monitor student postings.

Building parental involvement can be difficult, Butcher said, because many parents work more than one job and may not be able to afford to spend an hour at a parent-teacher conference.

Many parents may see a call from a teacher as an oncoming storm, he said.

“We try to make sure our teachers are calling parents for good stuff,” Butcher said. “That way we have the foundation to open up a line of communication when we need it.”

Butcher said he hopes to complete the school plan in the coming month, that they may implement it this year.

As Butcher and McDonald work to create a more comprehensive security plan, many questions are still unanswered.

“We don’t have all the solutions,” Butcher said, “but we’re revisiting our policies.”

One thing is certain, Butcher said: School security is changing, and if administrators hope to keep students safe, the district must change, too.