April 24, 2008
PVES Staff Scores High in Student Safety

By Dave Maxwell, Staff Writer

Pahranagat Valley Elementary School Principal Dr. Ken Higbee reported the school went to “restricted access” April 15-16 due to a serious incident. Owing to the incident Higbee said, “We went to what we call our restricted access protocol in our Critical Incident Plan and that involved limiting access to anyone entering our school.” The restricted access policy was lifted about 1:00 Wednesday afternoon and school returned to normal.

Lincoln County Sheriff Deputy Tyrell Walch said the incident was caused by an estranged father trying to locate his child and ex-wife. The father purportedly called the school office on Tuesday and “made threatening comments that he was going to come and get the child.” The mother of the child was contacted and she advised officials that the man was on probation in Oklahoma. Deputy Walch contacted the suspect’s Oklahoma probation officer and was informed that the suspect was still in Oklahoma. Walch said the probation officer had even talked to the suspect earlier that same morning and knew of his whereabouts. Walch said, “probation officers there have good tabs on him now.” Recognizing that the man was not in Nevada, Deputies allowed the school to resume normal operation Wednesday afternoon.

Deputy Walch said he thought the school did an excellent job in implementing their Critical Incident Plan. “Mr. Higbee did everything that he should have,” he said.

Dr. Higbee said, “We used our school Reach System to let every parent of every student in the school know what was going on, as much as we could. But when you have something like this happen, you’re dealing with privacy issues of individuals and issues of getting information out to the public.” The school never had to go to lockdown stage Higbee added, “Meaning you lock the doors, the kids are down and nobody gets out and nobody gets in.” The response to the incident Dr. Higbee said was “completely precautionary in nature, but in my opinion it was better to be safe than sorry. Our kids handled it wonderfully; our staff did a great job.”

Higbee complimented the Sheriff’s Office for doing an outstanding job of being on site when needed and he said that because of the fine job by the staff and law enforcement, most of the students were unaware anything was happening. He said he thought the matter will have a positive benefit for the school. “The safety of our students was our primary concern and we’re evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of our Critical Incident Plan and plan to do some further training for our staff, students and our community as well so we can all be on the same page if this was to ever happen again. It was a great training for our staff to take a look and see where are the holes when the real thing occurs.”