Big Sky High School Leaders to Host Community Forum on Safety
On Thursday, March 1, administrators at Missoula’s Big Sky High School will present an open forum on school safety, following the past weeks of incidents involving students and threats to security.
In fact, officials say all three public high schools have had similar problems.
MCPS Director of Communications Hatton Littman said the event is designed to allow parents, students and community members to have an opportunity to ask questions and make comments to school leaders.
“It’ll be partially open dialogue and there will also be an extensive question and answer period,” Littman said. “The administrators, meaning the principal, the two assistant principals and the school resource officer will be there to provide information about what we do in the school district and specifically at that school to address violence prevention, as well as student discipline.”
Littman said Big Sky is not the only high school to be affected by such incidents.
“Unfortunately, we are in a state of our society where high school students and adolescents in general unfortunately can make regrettable comments, they can act out in instances of impulsivity, and we do see similar graffiti, verbal threats or things like that at each of our schools,” she said. “Last week was a moment of certain attention to Big Sky, but we do see similar types of issues in each of our high schools. That’s why we have such strong threat assessment and violence prevention procedures in place to keep those school communities safe.”
Littman said after the school shootings in Florida, the conversation over school safety has become top of mind awareness once again, as it did after Newtown.
The forum will be Thursday at 6:00 p.m. in the Big Sky High School gymnasium.