School safety, security symposium slated for Westmoreland County Community College

Education and public safety leaders will gather for a symposium on school security and safety on Monday.

Learning how to assess threatening behavior, cyber security as a part of school security, and the challenges students and educators face in recovering from the impact of the covid pandemic, will be among discussion topics at a symposium at the Westmoreland County Community College’s Student Achievement Center near Youngwood.

The most critical lesson that one of the organizers hopes participants will take away from the symposium is “the importance of planning and preparation,” for a safety-threatening event, said Joseph Rice, safety and security coordinator for the Westmoreland Intermediate Unit. The event is scheduled to run from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., with about 10 speakers.

The target audience for the School Safety and Security Symposium is anyone involved with providing a safe, secure school environment including school administrators, teachers, counselors and public safety agencies, said Gene Komondor, a former North Huntingdon emergency management coordinator and a partner in One Star, a consulting firm for emergency management-related issues for schools and health care organizations.

One of the speakers, Tammy L. Hughes, a board-certified school psychologist and a psychology professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, is scheduled to discuss the topic of assisting youth who are at high risk for disciplinary actions that may result in juvenile or criminal justice action.

“Increased public safety begins with practical solutions that help our young people to thrive in their school and communities. We can accomplish this by focusing on stacking positive factors, so that scales tip toward the positive,” Hughes said. “Programming addressing early traumas and school connectedness can have a lasting effect on an adolescents’ capacity to develop into healthy adults and responsible citizens.”

Jeannette School District Superintendent Matt Jones, who was school superintendent in September 2019, when a fatal shooting occurred outside the school’s football stadium, will address after-school incidents.

Christopher Geary, a former FBI special agent who led a hybrid counterintelligence and cyber squad, will discuss cyber security as critical element of school security.

Tim Murphy, a former U.S. congressman and licensed psychologist specializing in resilience and recovery from psychological trauma, will speak about student resilience in recovering from the covid pandemic.

The symposium had been in the planning stages for eight months, Rice said, long before the tragic shootings at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where 21 people — 19 students and two teachers — were killed in a mass shooting on May 24 by a gunman.

Rice said he wants the participants to walk away from the symposium with some action “that they can use right away, that they can put into practice that day.”

The conference is funded by a school safety grant that the Westmoreland Intermediate Unit received from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.

Registration information is available at mylearningplan.com/webreg.