Santa Fe High School- May 18, 2018 – 10 killed, 13 injured
Uvalde – May 24, 2022 – 21 killed, 17 injured
Apalachee High School – September 4, 2024 – 4 killed, 8 injured
+100 more incidents since 2000
The nation has seen many tragedies over the last 24 years with a sudden surge in reported school threats. Among these districts is Pine Tree itself. Today, there is a lingering fear in almost every student’s, parent’s, school faculty’s, and community’s mind. This article intends to ease the mind of the Pine Tree community and showcase the steps that our school takes to keep students safe in the event a shooting threat is made or occurs.
Superintendent Steve Clugston
Q. How is the district working to prevent similar threats in the future?
A. “The biggest thing is communication with kids,” Superintendent Steve Clugston said. “The problem is today so much of kids’ communication is online, which takes away body language and it’s harder to realize just how big your audience is. It’s important for kids to know how important words are and the ramifications that come with them.”
Q. How does the school handle communication with parents and guardians of students when a potentially dangerous situation arises?
A. “It depends,” Clugston said. “If it is a joking matter, the student(s) involved will be dealt with disciplinarily. If we investigate and it’s a viable threat, we notify parents as soon as the police finish their investigation as quickly as we can in tandem with law enforcement. Or it could come out immediately if it is confirmed as viable or imminent.”
Director of Safety, Security & Transportation Jack Irvin
Q. What immediate steps and/or protocols are taken when the school gets word of a threat?
A. “We involve Longview PD. That’s the first thing right off the bat,” Irvin said. “If it’s a threat and, you know, I don’t think students understand how serious it is when you start putting a threat out on the wide area network or the wide area web. When you make a threat, you just committed a felony, and people are going to hunt you down to bring you to task on it. Anything that creates terror is a terroristic threat.”
Q. How do you plan on improving district security in the future?
A. “Continue training with students,” Irvin said. “I think students need to be more involved in their own personal safety. That’s what I think we need to do, to show students how to protect themselves.”
Glenn Derr: PTHS Resource Officer Since 2021
Q. How does the school go about assessing if action is needed to take place?
A. “We go based on if there’s a threat. If there is somebody that creates a threat on a social media platform, we will interview, investigate it, and make an arrest because that’s a crime, to threaten a specific school. If they say a specific school with a weapon, that’s a crime and they’ll be taken to jail for that. The ones that we don’t know for sure, some of the other social media stuff, we have to investigate through it by following leads and finding out where it came from. If it gets too serious, we can find out through technology where that person created that post, and everything’s not deleted, you might think it’s deleted, but it’s not.”
Q. When a threat is confirmed, what immediate steps are taken to ensure it doesn’t escalate?
A. “We’ll find out who it is and go to them and take action with that person, especially if it’s a juvenile. If it’s a kid, there is a possibility that if it gets that serious, the juvenile will go to jail and steps will be put in place with parents, like having no guns at the house. We can make that order. Because the parent is responsible for their child until they turn 17 or 18, there is a gray area with the Texas law.”
Q. How fast could the Longview Police Department get to Pine Tree High School in the case of a shooting?
A. “Less than five minutes. If there was an active shooter, they’ll be here in 2-3 minutes. We have that many officers on duty and will be getting here quick, and they are not only Longview. We have state troopers in the area, we have Greg County Sheriff Department in the area, there’s going to be a lot of officers coming, and we train every summer to handle active shooter situations.”
Q. What is the active shooter training that you go through?
A. “I’ll tell you this, it is as close to realistic as possible, as we can get it. What it is, is getting everybody on the same page on how to control a situation. One of the things, as officers our number one priority in something like that, in an active shooting, is stop the killing. So we have to stop the person that’s killing people. That is our number one priority. Then we start our second one, stop the dying. That means getting everybody that’s hurt and taking care of them, making sure they don’t die. Stop the bleeding and all that kind of stuff. And then, our next step is to get the evacuation done. Get those that are hurt and injured to a hospital for that advanced medical care that they need.”
Q. What would happen if parents just, all of a sudden, started coming to the school to pick up their kids in the case of a shooting?
A. “I believe it would create a lot of chaos. There was a shooting up in Washington D.C. where there was a response to shooters and there were over 150 police cars that came and they just crowded the whole area where it prevented EMS, the ambulance, to come in here to take the injured away. That right there shows that if we have parents get that information (shooting threats), that they would storm up here to get their kids and they would park all over the place that we couldn’t get an ambulance in here to get the injured out to that advanced medical care that they need to save their lives.”
