It’s on everyone’s minds and it’s hard to ignore. Turn on the cable news outlets, the evening news or check out your favorite news app. We’re experiencing one more example of mass violence, this time in a high school in Florida with kids who look much like our kids in Hopkinton, New Hampshire. We may disagree on whether the solution to this tragedy would have been more effective mental health treatment, a restriction on gun sales, or better background checks. But we do share one emotion: the incident makes us all a bit nervous for our kids.

I join my staff at Harold Martin and Maple Street Schools in emphasizing that our number one priority has always been the physical and emotional safety of our students. From our Responsive Classroom initiative that supports building positive classroom communities to our monthly assemblies at each school, we work hard to promote school-wide safety. We have numerous walkie-talkies in each building so staff can communicate quickly with each other inside and out of our buildings. We are vigilant about approaching visitors to our schools who have not signed in and are not wearing a visitor pass. Ironically, just yesterday a former Hopkinton student but someone I did not recognize walked onto the HMS playground at the end of the day and I approached her with my usual line “can I help you?”

Of course, we also have our usual lockdown and fire drills which staff and students perform expertly. I join Principals everywhere in considering our school’s children to be like our own children from the time they leave the bus stop to the time they arrive at school and back again. For example, when we have nasty New England weather, I’m not going to leave the district until all of the buses were back in the lot. That’s not unusual dedication – that’s just what we do.

But the sad reality of every tragedy is that it gives us pause to think how we can be even more effective at maintaining our students’ safety. In the coming days and weeks, like most schools in America, we will talk about updated staff safety training. We’re also making decisions soon on how best to use our state safety grant to improve the security at the entrances of all three schools. Both initiatives were planned before the recent Florida incident but are timely nonetheless.

Finding the balance on the school safety continuum is a great challenge. A current stream on our New Hampshire Principals’ Listserv concerns permanent School Resource Officers (SROs) in elementary schools which is fairly rare in New Hampshire. While Washington is debating gun control and arming teachers, schools in my area are looking at tightening up entrances and hiring SROs. School safety is truly a community issue and the more communities debate solutions together, the safer our students will be.