While I don’t have any additional information about the events of that day besides what is publicly available, I am certainly relieved the school took action to evacuate the building to ensure safety for the students and staff. Additionally, I believe the evacuation of the high school served two useful purposes: to identify holes in the crisis-planning process and to further underline the need for drills – because you can’t plan for every crisis situation. My experience was the vast majority of students remained calm and followed the directives of the staff.

In my tenure at the Bayfield schools, I have seen the administration make efforts toward embracing crisis planning. I must point out it is my strongly held belief the public shaming and minimization of this potentially dangerous situation by Chief Evans in the March 7 Herald does very little to advance this forward progress.

I believe school officials were acting in the best interests of students, with possibly very little information about what was occurring at AmeriGas. Were there problems? Sure, but when administration officials are publicly humiliated, often the result is to shrink away from the kinds of collaboration desperately needed among public-safety agencies in order to ensure the necessary protocols are in place for an appropriate crisis response.

My hope is in the future, the school and our public-safety officers can own their responsibility for mistakes and work together to solve these problems.

Traci Rock

Bayfield