47.

That's the number of school shootings in the U.S. so far this year as of September the 10th.

24.

We're on college campuses and 23 were on K through 12 school grounds.

That's according to an analysis by CNN.

And a week for gun deaths on school campuses dominated the headlines.

Yet again.

Kentucky had long before declared this week to be Safe Schools Week.

Leaders of the center for School Safety shared their reactions to the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk two days ago.

And we pick up the rest of our conversation with John Acres, explaining that although the news of school shootings seem frequent, statistically, they're rare.

Even though you hear about them quite a bit, when you look at 200,000 schools in the country and the number of shootings that occur, you're talking less than one tenth of a percent.

Right.

But I can't tell that to my friends down at Benton or Heath High School or over here at Carter County.

But the bottom line here is that we want to be sure that we set an environment that's safe for all those kids.

We have five bullying incidents that occur every minute in our schools, and those are the ones we know about.

And so those are issues that kind of come into play as well.

When it comes to trying to make that environment the way it should be.

As the timing would have it, this is Safe Schools Week in Kentucky, and perhaps it's even acknowledged nationwide.

I mean, how were you trying to frame this conversation at this particular time about keeping students and staff and visitors safe and schools?

Well, you know, with that, our agency, Trish, headed up the the, campaign that we're having focus on school safety.

And we're trying to get community folks.

We're talking, business people.

We're talking faith community to join those in the schools, to take a pledge to be kinder, to be somebody who's more tolerable, someone that would be willing to if you see something, say something.

You know, it takes a community to raise a child and it takes a community to keep a child safe.

And so we're looking at those factors right there.

But I would like to defer over to Trish because this is her campaign.

Let her kind of take it from there.

Yeah.

You are the creator, Doctor Greer.

So the floor is yours, ma'am.

What we want to do is we want to shine a light on conversations that can happen in your school and in your homes that can highlight, safety, school safety.

So an example would be, is, just like John said, if you see something or hear something, say something.

We want to have conversations about the stop tip line across the state of Kentucky to our students and community members.

Understand that Tipline is available for them to call in concerns they have, concerns can be about threats of violence, or they can be about, self threats like self-harm threats that they may be worried about.

One of their appears.

It's important when they do that.

They give as much information as possible.

Another thing that we really want to talk about is, looking at for kindness, you know, zoom in for kindness.

See?

Good.

Good acts that we see across our schools.

We want to teach people to have those behaviors that are not divisive, but that bring people together.

So our goal is to have conversations.

We want a culture where we talk about safety practices.

We want a culture of of reporting, that's really important to we don't want a culture where people feel like they can't let us know if someone's in danger or being mistreated at school or at home, right.

And some people are afraid, you know, bystanders say, I don't want to get involved or they're fearful or they're afraid they might misjudge a situation that could lead to, punishment for someone.

I mean, all of those things probably enter into one's mind when they think something might be a tad off, but they're afraid to report.

Well, what we'd like to do is get everything done.

Let us sift through and find out what's going down.

And of course, we keep tips like this anonymous and so we don't want the kids to, feel that some kind of retribution is going to happen.

If they do this, they might be saving a life.

And like Trish was saying, it may not be a school shooting, it might be self-harm issue.

Right?

And, when we first started our tip line, the first two hits we had were self-harm issues.

And so I'll say 30 to 40% of those, tips coming to that ballpark in the mental health area.

That's interesting.

And we know that September is suicide prevention.

So all of this really is connected.

And the time we have remaining just real quickly, John, as we look to the upcoming legislative session, that is a budget planning period for state lawmakers, is there one particular or couple of policies that you will be advocating for in the upcoming legislative session?

Well, the General Assembly has been very kind to us and our center over the years on this thing.

So I'm not asking for any money for us, which I'm sure they'll be happy to hear.

They're happy to hear that.

That's all right.

But, but we do have, a group of people out there that I think, I like to call attention to.

Those are our school resource officers and the General Assembly and the governor have come together and provided a $20,000, reimbursement for police officers that are in the schools who are trained SROs.

Now, that doesn't pay for their whole salary, but it's a good down payment.

And so we're going to be asking for that to continue as we grow with this.

We went from 150 SRO up to almost 900 now in our state.

And so, we have 1300 and some odd schools.

So we want to get an SRO in every one of our schools.

So we still have a lot of work to do, but that would probably be the only thing that I would go to the general Assembly with and just say, hey, ladies and gentlemen, please remember our SROs and reimbursement.

And are there enough school, psychologists or mental health professionals on in the districts to help kind of mitigate some of these concerns that we've talked about when it comes either self-harm or just distress that students may feel?

I think that's a mixed bag.

Some districts that have the funds are able to provide all those services that you're talking about, and some that have very poor, revenues coming in down there.

They have to make cuts.

And so, it's kind of a patchwork quilt, but we're certainly believe that the hardware side of this thing is just as important as the hardware.

Yeah.

And we've heard you say that before, and that's one of our favorite phrases, if we can frame it that way, Patricia, when he says hardware versus hardware.

Right.

And it requires both.

Yes.

To really help make society safer.

Well, thank you, Greer, for being with us.

John Akers, we thank you so very much.

And continued success and gratitude for all you do.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for having us.