Havre schools holding forum on safety procedures

Havre Public Schools is holding a forum next week where community members can talk about school safety.

“This is just to kind of get the conversation rolling,” said Superintendent Andy Carlson.

The forum was a topic at a Havre Public Schools planning workshop that followed a Havre Public Schools Board of Trustees special meeting to approve personnel action Tuesday at Robins School Administration Building.

The district is holding the forum Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Havre High School auditorium to discuss current safety procedures with parents. Attendees will be given three questions at the forum to answer via Mentimeter, a polling app that can be used on smartphones. 

The three questions that will be presented to the audience are:

• What is the greatest safety concern as a parent or community member?

• If you were an elected official or superintendent, what safety steps would you do next for the district?

• What do we have to do as a community to become the safest school district in the country?

The plan is to open the floor for 10 minutes to anyone from the community who wants to share any thoughts on the subject.

Of the Havre Public Schools employees, 215 have already participated in ALICE training, Carlson said. ALICE stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate, the ALICE training Institute website says.

The Havre district has scheduled its final ALICE training session Nov. 10. 

The board encouraged community members to attend Tuesday’s forum.

The board also talked about blueprints for upcoming changes to Havre High School that were laid out during the meeting. 

Plans are underway to remodel the bathrooms at Havre High. The remodeling, which is estimated to cost $400,000 to $450,000, will include increasing the size of the bathrooms and the sinks, making the stalls bigger and redesigning the handicap stalls to current Americans with Disabilities Act standards. 

Carlson said he realizes the cost may seem high, but assured the board that the cost was appropriate saying the price was just right considering the remodel.

Cosmetic changes will also be a part of the newly remodeled bathrooms. The long-standing green and pink tiles will be replaced by white tile with a Blue Pony stripe in both the men’s and women’s restrooms. Several design ideas are being discussed for the outside of the restrooms but the prevailing idea is a wrap of the Blue Ponies logo.

Testing for asbestos and lead have already been conducted and both reports have come back clean. Demolition is scheduled for May of 2019 and the remodeling is projected to be completed by the beginning of the 2019-2020 school year. 

The board also discussed future remodeling the high school science rooms, however, approval is still pending before any official plans are laid out. The idea would be to remodel five classrooms to bring them up to the level of other science classrooms in the state.