School district superintendent discusses school safety 

From Atascadero Unified School District Superintendent Thomas Butler:

Dear AUSD community,

I hope all of you are having a wonderful time with your family and friends this holiday season. Over the last couple of weeks, the school district has been reviewing our practices around fostering positive school campuses, supporting our students and staff, and improving the ability for individuals to report situations of concern. This in turn will allow us to respond in a timely and comprehensive manner.

Here are some of the steps we are taking to accomplish our goal of having safe and supportive school environments where students can pursue their goals of college and career, while developing excellent citizenship.

• We are pleased to share that this year we have been able to provide additional counseling services throughout the school district. These are highly trained and fully certified counselors that can support students and families on a wide variety of topics right at their school site.
• We remain fully committed to the Wellness Centers at Atascadero High School and Paloma Creek High School. The professional staff in the Wellness Centers is amazing and they are available to help our students and families with the most complicated situations.
• This fall we were able to add an additional Campus Supervisor to both Atascadero High School and Atascadero Middle School. The Campus Supervisors have a wonderful presence on campus and are deeply committed to supporting all of our students.
• The school district continues to benefit from an Atascadero Police Department School Resource Officer and a San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s Department School Resource Officer. They are truly an awesome resource for our community.
• All of our elementary schools are dedicated to developing positive citizenship in our students. Thanks to a strong partnership with Greyhound Foundation we have instituted the Where Everyone Belongs program at Atascadero Middle School this year. The program promotes kindness, respect, and citizenship with our middle school students. At Atascadero High School we continue to offer the Peer Mentoring Course which is another excellent resource for our students.
• We are working to provide clarity for reporting incidents at our two largest school sites (Atascadero High School and Atascadero Middle School) when we return in the new year. We have created a central reporting email address for each school. This will ensure that our school site administration can respond immediately to address the concern. When making a report we encourage the individual to provide us with their contact information and/or sufficient detail to investigate immediately. The reporting emails are:
  • Atascadero High School: ahs_cares@atasusd.org
  • Atascadero Middle School: ams_cares@atasusd.org.
  • For all other school sites please report any incidents of concern directly to
    your site principal.
• In addition, if there is a situation that presents an immediate danger please utilize 911. If an incident is criminal in nature, please report directly to law enforcement.

Thanks for your ongoing support of the Atascadero Unified School District. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me directly at (805) 462-4217.

Wishing all of you a wonderful holiday season,

Tom Butler
Superintendent

About the author: News Staff

News staff of the A-Town Daily News wrote and edited this article from local contributors and press releases. Scott Brennan is the publisher of this newspaper and founder of Access Publishing. Connect with him on Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, or follow his blog. He can be reached at scott@accesspublishing.com.