Henrico County manager, police chief issue plea to families about guns in schools

In light of a string of incidents involving guns in and near Henrico schools, Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas and Henrico Police Chief Eric English Tuesday issued a joint video urging parents and families to ensure that children do not have access to firearms in their homes or elsewhere.

In the nearly 4-minute video posted on the county’s social media platforms, Vithoulkas and English also urged parents to have conversations with their children and to pay close attention to their belongings and actions.

“Our parents are worried,” Vithoulkas said, noting that he had received in recent months a number of calls and emails from citizens in recent months. “Guns don’t belong in schools. There has been over the past year, year and a half a significant difference, if you will, in the things that our school system is seeing.”

The latest incident involved a fourth-grader bringing a loaded handgun to school, Vithoulkas said, apparently referencing a May 16 case in which a gun was discovered in a bathroom trashcan at Longdale Elementary School in Glen Allen.

The student who brought the gun had a conversation with another student, Vithoulkas said, and ultimately teachers, administrators and the police became aware and located the weapon.

“But the gun was loaded,” Vithoulkas said. “A fourth-grader had access to a loaded handgun.”

Henrico Schools officials have been working for several years to tighten security in schools through the addition of new security cameras, installation of security vestibules at the entrance to each school and a number of other initiatives.

Their latest effort will be the implementation of about 230 weapons-detection scanners at all 73 elementary, middle and high schools, a project to which Henrico School Board members agreed in principle during their May 25 meeting, following a series of tests at a handful of schools this spring and feedback from stakeholders. (A formal vote is likely next month.)

School officials also want to hire about 70 more school security officers as part of the plan.

That process, however, won’t happen quickly. It could take at least a year for the school system to purchase and install all necessary scanners, hire more employees to operate them and provide them with training, according to Henrico Schools Chief of Operations Lenny Pritchard told board members last week.

But officials hope to have scanners installed at all of the county’s high schools by the end of next school year.

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In the meantime, gun owners must do a better job ensuring that their weapons are not accessible to children or teens, English said.

“When you start to see guns in schools, that is a critical problem for all of us,” he said. “So as responsible gun owners, we have to do a better job of having those conversations with our kids, making sure we are locking up our firearms and making sure they are not accessible to our school-aged kids.

“Our kids are curious, so if you leave a weapon out in the open or something that is accessible to them, they’re going to experiment with those. We want to make sure that we’re not putting our kids in danger.”

A number of guns that make their way into underage hands are coming from unlocked and unattended vehicles, English said. He urged gun owners never to leave weapons in their vehicles.

“Your firearm should really be secured in your residence,” he said.

In addition to the incident at Longdale, a student brought a gun to Holman Middle School in January, and two students were found with guns at Highland Springs High School in November.

Last June, students at Varina and Hermitage high schools were charged after bringing guns to their schools. And last April, a Varina High School student was charged after being caught with a gun on the school’s campus.

English encouraged parents to pay attention to what their children are posting on social media and elsewhere online and also what they are bringing to school with them.

“Because you just never know what your kid’s gonna walk out of the house with,” he said.

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The security improvements that have been made or are being made at county schools are numerous, Pritchard told the school board in February.

They include:

• the construction of 23 new vestibules (locked lobby areas between the outside doors of a school and the inside that require staff members to provide access electronically to visitors) at schools that previously lacked them, with 22 additional sites scheduled to be completed this summer (at which point every school will have one);

• the addition of card-readers on exterior doors at semi-campus style schools, so that only cardholders can swipe to enter quickly;

• the addition of card swipes for fire-responders;

• additional walkie-talkies for staff members to use for communication;

• unified signage, including exterior door number signs, pathway indicators and classroom numbers on exterior windows, all designed to make it easier for first-responders to find specific locations.

• the creation of digital maps of all 73 school facilities so that first-responders will have detailed information immediately in the case of an emergency.

• more frequent sweeps of schools by Henrico Police K-9 units;

Those additional safety measures come on top of 16 existing measures already in place within the school system – a list that includes:

• Anonymous Alerts, a system through which reports of potential violence may be submitted;

• crisis response teams;

• systems of emergency response protocol and training;

• threat-assessment teams;

• a rapid notification system in the event of an emergency;

• enhanced security cameras (all secondary schools have received updated systems in recent months).

All  of those enhancements will help, Vithoulkas said, but community members need to do their part, too.

“We’ve got the physical improvements that are being made, but . . . we as parents have to have an honest conversation,” Vithoulkas said. “We’re all responsible for all of the kids in all of our schools. This message is, it’s coming from my heart as a parent speaking to parents. We do so much for our kids. This county does so much. We can do this as a community. There’s no reason that elementary school, middle school, high school kids should have access to a gun at home.

“Please help us.”