ARE DOUGHERTY COUNTY SCHOOL SYSTEM SCHOOLS SAFE?

The Dougherty County School Board should openly address school safety and take action to make schools safer for students and teachers!

On Monday, August 12, 2024, as students were being dismissed for the day, gunfire broke out at Monroe High School. The regularly scheduled Dougherty County School Board meeting was held at the downtown Administration Building just 2½ hours later. Not a word about the shooting incident, that also involved two students being arrested, was uttered! Nothing to see here! Crickets!

Open Records Requests submitted to DCSS for incident, crime, arrest, and weapons statistics for the last two school years are revealing.

In response to an Open Records Request for DCSS Police Department data and statistics for the 2023 school year for each school, the DCSS response included two parts. Part 1 was comprised of 101 pages entitled “Incident Arrest Media” with 3-10 incidents listed per page, not sorted by school listing. Part 2 was 56 pages entitled “Offense Details Report” with 8-9 incidents listed per page, not sorted by school listing.

Again, in 2024 for the 2024 school year, an Opens Records Request was submitted for the DCSS Police Department data and statistics, sorted by school. The DCSS response was a 24-page packet entitled “Case Status Report” with an average of 20 incidents per page but again not sorted by school listing.

According to the DCSS response, the DCSSPD in the 2024 school year made 372 arrests from August 1, 2023 - May 30, 2024.

Are the Dougherty County citizens and parents supposed to believe that the DCSSPD does not have computer capabilities to analyze and aggregate their data by school, by types of incidents, arrests, and number of guns/weapons found?

The Dougherty County School Board Transportation, Safety and Security Committee (according to the DCSS website: Chaired by M. Strother, Committee Members: G. West-Hudley, D. Phinazee) should be having regularly scheduled meetings and require detailed quarterly reports on what is really going on in our schools.

In December 2021 at Westover High School, there were five brawls/fights in a single day. The DCSS press release labeled them “scuffles”. But when the student recorded videos hit Facebook, it was clear that the incidents were not “scuffles” but actually brawls.

In March 2023, a “large fight” broke out at Dougherty High School that resulted in fourteen student arrests and a DCSSPD officer sustaining a broken ankle after being deliberately tripped by a student in the corridor when the officer was responding to the fight.

Sources:

Albany Herald: December 9, 2021

WALB News: March 21 and 24, 2023

Dougherty County School System ORRs dated June 1, 2023 and June 12, 2024 Dougherty School System website

END

10/3/2024