Meet WSD’s New Safety & Security Coordinator Tom Couey

To further enhance the safety and security of Wenatchee School District students and staff the District recently hired Tom Couey as the Safety & Security Coordinator. Tom has spent the last six years building relationships with staff and students as a safety & security officer at Wenatchee High School. We caught up with Tom to learn more about him and the important work he’ll be doing to support thriving environments where students feel safe, are seen and valued and know they belong.

What’s your background?

I have a Degree in Botany From Central Washington University so I’m a multifaceted safety guy.  I can tell you what to do in a crisis and also how to make your flowers bloom. I’m a retired Sergeant from the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office. I like to tell people that law enforcement is like having a seat in the front row of life. I got to see nearly every aspect of the human experience, the lowest lows, and the highest highs. It was something. During the early 1990’s I was involved in developing a class to teach police how to respond to an active gunman in school. This was long before Columbine and the training was novel at the time.  We trained hundreds of police officers all over the Pacific Northwest and freely shared our curriculum. Over time I’ve developed a deeper understanding of the importance of connection and believe school safety should be a holistic approach that includes connection, prevention and response.

What will your new job as the District’s safety and security coordinator entail?

My job is a new one at the District so it’s a bit of an evolving design. Currently, I am working on our emergency planning and preparedness, supporting our SROs and SSOs, and assessing the safety needs of the district.  We’ve just completed Security walk-through inspections of all of our facilities and those visits have sparked some great conversations and ideas. There is no way to improve on our safety without first finding out about all of the great things schools are already doing to support safety and then finding ways to lower the barrier to all of the things we wish we were doing.

How does your role support student learning and success?

We often say that school safety is our top priority and it should be because safety and our promise to create opportunity and success for our students are linked. Studies have shown learning is much more difficult if you don’t feel safe. Our ancient brains are programmed for survival and they just won’t concentrate on, let’s say trigonometry when the wolf is at your door. Safety is so impactful that it can outstrip most every other obstacle to learning. What helps students have a feeling of security? Equity, inclusiveness, and meaningful relationships.  When students trust their connection with their teachers, when they feel welcomed as part of their school community and when they see equity and fairness in the very foundation and fabric of their school - then they can feel truly safe, and then they can move on socially, emotionally, academically and eventually even “trigonometrically.” 

What are you most excited about in your new role?

I’ve been fortunate to have made a lot of great friendships in the past 6 years working in the district. I am excited to build on those relationships and expand on them throughout the district and carry with me the message that safety and security are not an imposition but rather a fundamental part of our promise to build a foundation of diversity, equity, and inclusion from which our students emerge future-ready.  A message that safety and security are more than just locks and fences and fire drills, but that safety is intrinsic to the social and emotional wellbeing of our students and that the most important part of building safe schools is doing what teachers are already great at doing— fostering an environment where their students can flourish, are seen and valued, feel safe, and know they belong. We need to reframe our thinking about safety and see it not as a separate thing but as part of our culture, our mission, and our design. The desire for safety is ingrained in each of us, so in order for us to meet the needs of our students, our staff, our parents, and our community - it must be ingrained in our schools too.  

What do you plan to do in your first 30 - 90 days on the job?

Oh boy. I often describe safety as just going around tightening screws.  You tighten some screws and then you see some loose ones over there, so you tighten those and then these others got loose again, so you tighten those and then you realize you didn’t see those ones, so you tighten those.  It’s never really over, it’s never really done.  There are a lot of jobs like that in the district.

Initiatives I’m working on now are; simplifying, updating, and improving our Standard Response Protocol, these are the protocols you are used to doing in drills, such as evacuation, shelter in place, etc. Writing our Emergency Response & Crisis Management Plan, a very large document that lays out how we will manage a crisis (I hope you never have to read it). Standing up a blog about school safety (I hope you will read it). Improving our plans for the secondary evacuation of our schools. Updating and improving our radio communications and planning some improvements to our physical plant with an eye toward safety. Yeah, that should get me to 90 days.

What else do you want our staff and parents to know about you and your role?

While I was in law enforcement I studied school violence and I concentrated on planning, emergency response, incident command, and hardening the vulnerabilities inherent in schools. While all of those things are important, I've come to understand they are not the whole equation— school safety begins with the power of connection. So if our mission is to educate, and our priority is safety, then our imperative must be equity, inclusion, and meaningful relationships.