Safety is one of the most important standards at Caney Creek. Whether it’s the students, teachers or parents, we all agree that we need to guarantee some form of safety to us students.

Principal Dr. Jeffrey Stichler has done a lot for us in terms of safety. He’s helped increase officers on campus, hired a hall monitor and the district has added AnonymousAlerts to all schools.

Last year, there were only about two officers at our school on any given day. According to Stichler, there’s been an increase in officers but for safety reasons he cannot give an exact number.

While we could have officers patrolling the hallways, to many of us it would not be an environment we could thrive in. “There are certain things hard with a school because it’s not a military base,” Stichler said, “It’s supposed to be open and inviting to kids.”

So instead of officers we have the hall monitor Ronald Sanders. His main purpose is to monitor the halls to keep students in their right areas but also to help keep unwanted guests out.

He checks where we are suppose to be and if we are students are with lanyards and passes. Each hallway has a designated color, students have to wear the same color lanyard as the hallway they are in or they can get into trouble such as after school detention, write up, or ISS. Many students have complained about them, but most agree that they do their job.

While the lanyards and hall monitor are new, there’s something else that’s old being highlighted now more than ever.

While all these new ideas have been put into place and have created a safer environment for students and teachers alike, there is still more that the student body can do to keep us safe. Many things happen in our school that we see everyday, despite seeing the event we often don’t say anything. When we ask for safety we have to be able to keep ourselves safe by if we see something say something, AnonymousAlerts allows us to be able to say something.

The AnonymousAlerts is an app you can download to anonymously send messages, whether its a school incident like, kids smoking in the bathroom, or a home incident like abuse. The app lets you send your alert in many ways, a couple are, text messages, video or photos. This allows anyone to be able to send in alerts, because the app is for not just students; it’s for teachers, parents, a neighbor, this app is for the community.

This year, speak up at school; our school becoming safer isn’t just because of administration, its because of students that spoke out about problems at our school. We all have to do our part to keep each other safe, are you?