Security tightened at school

I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.

Oct. 7, 1999

By Devlyn Brooks

Cass Lake-Bena Superintendent Mary Helen Pelton said Wednesdays even amid the school district's attempts to tighten security last year, one child was abducted from the Cass Lake-Bena Elementary School.

Pelton added she is aware that a second possible abduction attempt also was committed last year.

Last spring, near the end of the school year, Cass Lake-Bena Elementary School staff allowed a student to be taken out of school with a relative, who then kidnapped the child and took them to the Twin Cities metro area where some type of harm did occur.

Pelton said the abductor was a relative, who withdrew the child from the school under false pretenses and "without the (rest of the) family knowing." She added the person was not a parent of the child.

She said this incident was complicated by the fact that the student's parents did not have a phone, and so school staff could not verify if the relative was being truthful.

No arrests have been made in the incident, Pelton said, and it is being investigated by a special unit of the Minneapolis Police Department.

Calls to the Minneapolis Police Department were not immediately returned Wednesday.

"Because of this, we've become much more stringent (with people withdrawing students from school)," Pelton said. "We needed to do that anyway, but this raised our level of concern. It's a cautionary tale to parents."

The second incident that occurred in the Cass Lake-Bena District last year was a possible abduction attempt.

Pelton said the elementary school received a telephone call during which a person asked the staff to keep a certain child off their bus that day because the child was going to be picked up at the school.

The caller asked the school staff to have the child standing in front of the school by its flag pole. Time kept passing with no one picking up the student. At 4 p.m., the child's mother called and asked where her child was.

Pelton said she doesn't know if the incident was a hoax or if it was an abduction attempt foiled because school staff had been standing with the student.

Tightening security

Pelton said that some of the district's security measures have changed since last year, but not only because of the two incidents. Ironically, the district was working on tightening security last year when these incidents took place.

Some of the new security policies at the district's elementary school, high school and alternative learning center include:

• All visitors to the buildings are directed to report to the office.

• Everybody in the buildings is required to wear identification, including staff and visitors. In addition, vendors are required to display a company logo on their clothing and school staff should direct and escort any unidentified visitor to the office.

• All doors except for the main entrances are locked from the inside.

• Policies concerning who can remove a student from school during and after classes have been made more stringent. And policies concerning how school staff are informed of students being removed from school -- including phone calls and written notes -- are also stricter.

• A video monitoring system has been installed at the main entrance to the elementary school.

• And finally, the Cass Lake-Bena School Board is implementing a crisis plan that was adopted by the board last year.

Pelton said some parents have reacted negatively to the changing policies, saying the district is trying to restrict their access to their children. But she says it really is restricting strangers' access to their children.

"I can tell you that a child was harmed, and that makes it all so much more serious," Pelton said in a Cass Lake Times article. "We do all we can to insure children's safety, but it can still happen. That's why we want parents to understand that if we seem to be making things inconvenient, it's because we care. If one child is harmed, it's too many."