Lt. Colonel Robert Blankenship
Chief of Staff
West Virginia State Police

Senator Byrd, thank you very, very much for the opportunity that you extended to the West Virginia State Police to be a part of this forum.

I'd like to add one thing to my biography,  and that happens to be my greatest accomplishment in life to this point.  That is, I'm a father.  I have three children -- a 15-year-old daughter and 13-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. 

As a parent, I'm very active in school.  I've served as president of the PTA for two years, and I've served as president of our Little League baseball program back at home for three years -- I am a glutton for punishment. 

And being an active parent, about two years ago, the principal of the middle school came to me.  He asked me, "Does the West Virginia State Police have any type of program that we could give to the teachers about school violence?"  I was embarrassed because I had to say no.  But I told him, "You give me a little bit of time and we will have one." 

So, I went to Colonel Edgell, who in turn went to Governor Underwood, and I went to the academy staff.  Being the chief of staff, you have some control.  I told them to get together, research, and put together a curriculum so that we could go to every school that wanted it and talk to every teacher. 

I've done a lot of programs in my 23 years at schools.  I've talked to a lot of PTAs, I've talked to a lot of teachers, I've talked to a lot of principals.  I was absolutely amazed, in my travels, at the numbers of teachers and the numbers of principals who had never met nor did they even know the name of the detachment commander of the West Virginia State Police in the county in which they worked.  That is sad that we didn't have better communication than that. 

One of the reasons for this program was to require that the detachment commander or a member of that detachment go to the school, talk to those teachers, and to be able to put names with faces.  I'm sure you all will agree with me that if you can put a name with a face, you will have a whole lot more confidence in that person than just talking to an unknown person on the phone. 

We trained 60 troopers to teach this program to teachers.  We now have a trooper in every county for the principal to call to set up this program. We set it up at their convenience.  We go to the school and it takes about two hours.  The curriculum deals with firearms in the school.  I'm sure some of you have heard the terminology "code red."  We designed code red and the program which teaches school personnel what to do in a code red. 

We stress uniformity, whether we have an incident in Hancock County or Mingo County.  We want the response to be uniform.  There are things that the administrator of that school can do to assist the West Virginia State Police or any other police agency when they get there.  These are the things that we discuss. 

We are conducting phase two of the program right now, and it goes right along with what Chris Martin was talking about.  We are sending our troopers out to the schools and they have a preprinted 14-page form.  The form asks questions such as: which doors are locked, what type of locks, which ways do the doors swing?  Does the door swing to the left, to the right, is it inside, is it outside?  Is it a lighted entrance? 

Our special-response people need to know all of this before they get there.  What utility companies are used?  Who are the administrators?  Who has keys?  These are various security things that we want to know.  We asked for blueprints for the schools.

We will take these site surveys and blueprints and put them on file at the West Virginia State Police office, so if a teacher or principal calls us with a code red, we pull the file and we know everything we need to know about that school before we ever leave the office. 

We have completed about 402 schools as of Wednesday.  We are about half-way there.  We have taught over 9,000 school employees how to deal with firearms in schools.  We are also working very diligently on phase three right now.  We have all types of specialties in the State Police.  We have the aviation division and the SRT Teams, which are the special response teams trained in tactical entry to building and tactical response to various situations.  We have the canines.  We have a critical incident and management plan that is a huge notebook.  It is a guide for what to do during critical incidents. 

We started looking through the guide and realized it was outdated.  It did not deal with our current problems.  We are rewriting the manual and we are trying to marry all of these specialties together.  We have the canine people telling us what they need before they get to the scene.  We have the aviation people doing the same thing.  What we want to do ultimately, once we marry all these specialties together into one nice neat notebook, is issue that to every member.  So, when Sergeant Joe at Podunk High School gets the call, he has this notebook that will tell him what his immediate needs are and who he should call to get them. 

Some of that is going to take initiative on his part because he is going to have to fill in his own personal information about the fire departments in that county, and EMS personnel and everybody else in that county that he may need.  We are training them at our very next in-service on how to fill this out and what information you have to know. 

After we marry our people together, the next step is to go outside and marry the outside agencies that we will be calling on.  The West Virginia Department of Education has a critical incident management plan.  Guess what? I have never seen it, and they have never seen ours.  That is going to change.  We are going to put those two plans together. 

Let me say something about the West Virginia Department of Education right now.  When we first started this, we called the state Department of Education, and we received immediate cooperation.  I cannot say enough good things about the Department of Education.  They have been absolutely fantastic. 

I want to propose a challenge to you for this afternoon.  Everybody and every agency is doing what their heart tells them is the right thing to do to combat school violence.  That's great.  But, we have to work together.  Everybody in this room and everybody in society have to take a certain amount of responsibility for what is happening in our schools today.  You must quit pointing fingers and you must understand it is your responsibility as much as it is mine.  If we are going to share the responsibility, we must share in the solution.  My challenge to you is find a way that we can get over the egos, we can get past the territorial things, and we can work together for the betterment of the children of West Virginia.