OXFORD, Mich. – Oxford parents and residents are still deeply concerned about the investigation into the school shooting.
The Guidepost Solutions report is 572 pages long. But members of the Oxford community still have questions, which is why they scheduled three different community meetings on Thursday (Nov. 2).
There are still more questions asked than answered. There’s a lot of concern many in the school system refused to cooperate with the investigation, and finding answers took a very long time.
Others were concerned about what didn’t get into the report that they believe should have.
A couple dozen people showed up for the early afternoon session, looking to the Guidepost group investigators to answer questions like Jackie Gin’s who was frustrated as she wanted to know about the in-school security camera system.
“Should the SRO have logged in at 8 a.m. in moving this was almost 1 o’clock and there were no cameras on so nobody can ever look at the cameras if they wanted to or cared to,” said Gin.
SRO is the armed school resource officer who Guidepost says just happened to visit the middle school and wasn’t in the high school building when the shooting occurred. And while another person in the office knew how to put the cameras on, they weren’t on.
Ray Blake wanted an answer to the most basic question.
“What stopped the ‘I forgot their names,’ the two people who the shooter in the officer, what stopped them from searching his backpack,” said Blake.
Guidepost’s Andy O’Connell said it was enough there to stop him.
“There was enough there,” O’Connell said. “A threat assessment should have been done which should have included a request to search.”
Parent Kal Meyers said the report left out a major factor, which was that the district was looking to lure more lucrative out-of-district children to Oxford schools, disregarding bad behavior.
“When you look at this, they were not busy looking at our district, they were busy trying to build an empire at a time when our district population of students was shrinking, where they wanted to fill their administrative offices and keep their cushy jobs, and they did it knowing they were not doing their jobs,” Meyers said.
Meyers spent much time with the Guidepost investigators discussing safety assessment.
State law says the district should have been working on a new plan due a month after the shooting, but both agreed the system wasn’t working on it and was not following state law at the time. It’s just one of the many things the report pointed out were massive failures by the district that day.