Two months after Tucson Unified School District leaders said they would make security changes throughout the district to ensure safer campuses, administrators are refusing to release details.
Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo, during a back-to-school briefing with local media in late July, said the district’s Safety Team was prioritizing making improvements to school campuses that don’t have exterior fencing, surveillance cameras and keyless entry systems.
But when the Arizona Daily Star filed a request under the state’s public records law for a list of schools that were missing one or more of those safety features, the district did not fulfill it.
“We must decline public disclosure as releasing such detailed facility security information would place schools, students, staff and visitors at risk,” Robert Ross, the district’s general counsel, said in an email.
“We take our responsibility to make public records accessible very seriously. However, we have to balance that with the responsibility for safety of our students,” he wrote, citing a case law in the decision to keep the information private.
He acknowledged but did not fulfill an amended public records request asking for the number of school campuses in the district that were missing one or more of the top-priority security systems.
Dan Barr, a Phoenix attorney with Perkins Coie law firm whose practices include a focus on media law, said the case law cited by TUSD is about “withholding information in the best interest of the state.”
But in this case, he said, the best interests of the state favor disclosure of the information since the request asks for broad information about school safety features, rather than a detailed roadmap of those systems on each campus.
“They don’t have to provide schematics about where the systems are and how to get around them or how to turn them off,” Barr said. “But they should be able to answer whether or not they’ve been installed at the schools.”
He added: “And given the horrific events that have been going around in the country like school shootings and other things, I think parents and everybody else has a right to know whether these updated security systems have been, in fact, installed in the schools.”
Unfulfilled requests
Following the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, the TUSD governing board voted to hire an additional six armed officers for a total of 21 armed safety employees throughout the district.
Board member Adelita Grijalva, at the time, said making physical improvements to campuses was just as crucial to ensuring students’ and employees’ safety while at school.
Superintendent Trujillo and Safety Team Director Joseph Hallums assured her that campus safety assessments were already in the works to determine the specific security flaws and areas of improvement needed at each campus.
During the July briefing with the media, Trujillo said the district would also enact changes to schools’ visitation policies in time for the 2022-23 school year. Those changes, he said, were an effort to prevent incidents like a brawl at Tucson High Magnet School in May, which resulted in the arrests of a father and a teenager.
Trujillo said those changes would be disclosed to the public and the media as soon as they were discussed with school principals.
The Star submitted repeated requests throughout August asking for information on the district’s security improvement efforts, as well as information on the changes made to the visitation policies.
TUSD did not fulfill the requests. Instead, district spokeswoman Karla Escamilla provided the following statement in an email:
“The TUSD Governing Board has not yet discussed any changes to the district’s Visitors to Campus board policies. Our schools have adjusted their procedures to ensure more oversight of who comes on their campus and where visitors can go. The TUSD School Safety Emergency Managers are visiting each campus to conduct assessments and meeting with administrators.”
The governing board, during its Sept. 13 meeting, discussed updating the district’s visitation policy, though the changes were only about bringing procedures to par with state statute.
The board did not discuss any changes spurred by the district’s efforts to increase safety on campus.
Staff shortages in TUSD meant teachers often took on combined classes
