Salem-Keizer School District officials are considering installing weapons detectors at school entrances following a shooting last week involving multiple students in Bush’s Pasture Park.
Superintendent Andrea Castañeda made the announcement Monday evening at a forum for South Salem High School families.
“We do it with real reluctance because we don’t want to be living in a world in which weapons detection is part of schools,” Castañeda said, speaking in the school’s commons.
But she said ignoring the problem was not a viable option.
“We live in the world as it is together,” she said.
The room was packed with about 200 parents and students sitting at lunch tables, with more standing in the back of the room and lining the staircase leading up to the school’s main floor.
A tense silence settled over the room as Castañeda made her announcement.
Tara Romine, South’s principal, stood against the west wall of the commons. Tears streamed down her face as the superintendent spoke.
Police and district leaders at the event shared more information about the March 7 shooting that left 16-year-old Jose Vasquez-Valenzuela dead and two other teens wounded. The shooting prompted a lockdown at South that afternoon where students and teachers barricaded themselves in classrooms.
A year ago, the school went into lockdown and a student was subsequently arrested when a gun was found in a car in the school parking lot.
The school, which has 2,218 students and about 150 teachers and staff, has been on edge in the days since, with many parents keeping their high schoolers home.
The accused shooter, Nathaniel McCrae, 16, turned himself in over the weekend. McCrae and Vasquez-Valenzuela are both sophomores at South.
Among the details shared Monday:
- McCrae and Vasquez-Valenzuela attended school the morning of the shooting.
- School officials don’t know if there was a loaded gun on South’s campus ahead of the shooting.
- Police have not yet determined if the shooting was gang-related, in part because they are still trying to locate teens who were involved. Witnesses described seeing a group of 10 to 15 teens congregating in the park just before the shooting.
- South students were just finishing the second lunch session at the time. The students connected to shooting had an earlier lunch period and should have been in class.
- For now, South’s campus will remain open during lunch, but Bush’s Pasture Park is now off-limits to students.
Weapons detection and school security
School district leaders began considering weapons detection systems last fall because of a rising number of shootings in Salem, and more involvement of teens.
“We have been over that entire period alarmed by what we’ve seen,” Castañeda said.
They’ve looked at products and talked to vendors, she said. Companies that make weapons detections systems told district officials that schools are their top growth area.
“We’ve also started to quietly talk with all of our building administrators about some things that this would mean for the way that our students enter every day,” she said.
Castañeda said originally, district leaders hoped to roll out the idea more slowly through a series of community conversations.
“Last week’s incident shows us that the conversation came to us. And so now we start it with you,” she said.
The systems they’re looking at aren’t boxy metal detectors. Castañeda said they’re portable and likened them to the scanners patrons walk through at the Salem Public Library, which scan for books that haven’t been checked out.
It wasn’t immediately clear how district officials would decide to go ahead with the detectors or what the cost might be. School budgets are being cut by millions for the upcoming school year.
District spokesman Aaron Harada said the district would hold a community demonstration of weapons detection systems on March 22, with more details to come.
Castañeda also addressed questions from parents in the audience about school resource officers. Her predecessor, Christy Perry, removed officers from schools in the spring of 2021. Previously, the district contracted with local police to station one officer at each high school. That service cost about $1 million a year. Castañeda said she’s worked in other school districts that contracted for officers on campus, and districts that employed their own officers.
“I am not going to tell you that one type is clearly better or worse than the other. I am going to tell you that layered systems of safety is what matters,” she said. “Metal detection is a far more systematic and comprehensive approach to preventing weapons from getting into our schools. I believe it is the most thorough thing we can do.”
Salem-Keizer has the best safety team and security processes of all the districts she’s worked in, she said. Those systems are going to keep students and educators safe better than “a small additional number of staff who could never possibly be everywhere,” she said.
Shooting motives
Police and school employees who work with kids considered at risk for troubling or illegal behavior said they had little understanding yet of what prompted the shooting.
Deputy Chief Treven Upkes of the Salem Police Department said detectives are trying to speak to other teens who were present at the shooting.
He said that while Salem has active gangs, violence is often attributable to groups – looser affiliations that aren’t tied to larger organized criminal enterprises.
A recent report commissioned by the police department about the rise in shootings in Salem noted that a majority of shootings involve people affiliated with a gang or group, but the report didn’t draw distinctions between the two categories when analyzing shooting data.
“A lot of times these are loose associations of people or juveniles who aren’t doing other things that are gang-related,” Upkes told parents. “Close group affiliations that spawn animosity between other groups is a better description of what that is. And honestly, at this point, we still haven’t gotten to the bottom of what the exact motive for this event was.”
Ken Ramirez, a security field coordinator with the school district, said he had no warning of the shooting from the students he works with.
Ramirez works one-on-one with students who are involved in gangs or at risk for violence. His students typically let him know when conflict or trouble between groups is brewing, but he said nobody had an inkling ahead of Thursday’s shooting.
Ramirez said he knows and is in touch with some of the students involved, but hadn’t previously worked with Vasquez-Valenzuela, the student who was killed. He doesn’t know what prompted the shooting.
In the days since, he’s been reaching out to friends of the victims, urging them to stay in school where they’re safe.
He wants to help students learn better how to resolve differences so they don’t resort to violence.
“A decision in one second can affect the rest of their lives,” he said.
CORRECTION: The teen who died in the shooting is Jose Vazquez-Valenzuela. His name as provided by Salem police earlier was incorrectly spelled.
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Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers city news, education, nonprofits and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade. Outside of work, she’s a skater and board member with Salem’s Cherry City Roller Derby and can often be found with her nose buried in a book.
