On the second anniversary of the Columbine massacre, an 11-year-old middle-school student named Libby didn’t go to school. Neither did her older brother or sister. Instead they stayed home with permission of their mother, who wondered if keeping her kids out of school on a day where there was the potential for another violent student act outweighed the advantages of that day’s education.

Fortunately there was no terroristic reprise that day, but Libby wrote out her “last will and testament” anyway, entrusting it to an older sibling for safekeeping. It was in this way that the document came to the attention of her grandfather, a school safety expert employed by the Harris County Department of Education Institute for Safe and Secure Schools.

The school safety expert asked professionals in education and law enforcement: If the primary concern of an 11-year-old student is whether she is going to “die 2morow,” as written in Libby’s last will and testament, then how are teachers to educate a workforce which can compete successfully in the world economy?

Children need to feel safe in order to learn, and that concern is motivating many Texas schools to employ a wide variety of safety tactics ranging from metal detectors to evacuation drills to legal education curriculums designed to teach life lessons above and beyond students’ routine studies.

TYLA recently rolled out the latest in a series of consequence-based legal education programs to be provided to school districts and taught by volunteer lawyers all over Texas. The program is called “It Could Be You” and encourages students to participate in stopping potentially deadly criminal activities by simply reporting the event to someone, preferably before it happens. The program is one safety tactic that should be embraced by school districts statewide, who will be provided the program free of charge, courtesy of TYLA.

Interestingly, most schools in Texas embrace and promote the concept of student “reporting,” often through crime tips hotlines and Crime Stoppers programs. More than 500 Crime Stoppers programs serve adult and student populations in the state. Contact information specific to every program location in Texas can be found at www.crimestoppers.swt.edu.

Some crime-reporting programs endorsed by schools offer cash rewards and/or anonymity, some don’t. It is important for school districts and the parents of children in those districts to realize that only Crime Stoppers programs enjoy statutory protection of their call records and communications made by callers.(1) Neither in-house school tip lines nor police agency records are statutorily protected in the same way. For this reason alone, school administrators and parents should weigh the advantages of utilizing established tactics like Crime Stoppers programs when encouraging students to report crimes, before and after the fact.

Since curriculums like “It Could Be You” encourage reporting crimes while they are still in the planning stages, a quick assessment of local crime reporting resources within and outside the school setting should be checked out ahead of time so that kids know who to call or tell if they make the decision to report.

“Speak out — sometimes to the person committing a crime, other times to an adult you can trust,” said David Henderson of the Houston Young Lawyers Association to eighth-grade students at Marshall Middle School in Houston.

One of the largest local Crime Stoppers Safe School programs operates in Houston, where the non-profit organization has aggressively promoted proactive use of the crime tips hotline since 1997. The program encourages anonymous student reporting by phone and the Internet, and offers cash rewards from $50 to $5,000 for information that leads to the arrest and charging of offenders responsible for committing or planning serious crimes. Police assigned to the Crime Stoppers of Houston Law Enforcement Detail take all verifiable tips, forward them to campus police and administrators, and if a crime is averted or solved as a result, and evidence is sufficient for criminal charges, the student caller receives a cash reward through an anonymous payment procedure.

In Houston, this local resource has netted 32 weapons (14 guns, 16 knives, and two other) along with drugs ranging from heroin to ecstasy, confiscated when students utilized the Crime Stoppers tip line. High dollar arsons and mischief cases are routinely solved through use of this resource. One student reported a fellow student’s plan to bomb their school and assassinate a teacher who had angered him. The caller’s information was verified by evidence recovered by case officers that included a hand-drawn diagram for carrying out the plan. Intervention was the result, and potentially tragic consequences were averted — all through use of a tactic as simple as an anonymous crime tips hotline. Additional information on the Crime Stoppers of Houston Safe School Program can be found at www.crime-stoppers.org.

TYLA’s “It Could Be You” curriculum is an excellent venue for promotion of these local resources. Lawyers can help in keeping kids safe statewide by participating in the program which informs kids about where and who to call when trouble starts.

While these strategies are not an end game in school security, simple lessons conveyed by volunteer lawyers can go a long way in making their communities safer. Of course, schools should be encouraged, along with local governmental entities, to develop and utilize multi-level school safety strategies with both short and long term goals for making campuses as safe as they can be.

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Notes

1. Texas Govt. Code Art. 414.

Kim Ogg is the executive director of Crime Stoppers of Houston. She is a former chief felony prosecutor with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office and past director of the Mayor’s Gang Task Force in Houston. Ogg is the author of “Texas Gangs: the Legal Handbook,” available through the Texas District & County Attorney’s Association at (512)474-2436.