Smooth start to school in SDOC

Following yesterday afternoon’s shootings at Townville Elementary School in Anderson County, law enforcement increased their presence at schools in the School District of Oconee County (SDOC) this morning. Oconee County Schools Assistant Superintendent of Operations Steve Hanvey said it was a smooth start to school this morning. “We had some extra law enforcement present at our elementary schools, which don’t always have that because they don’t have resource officers. Our middle and high schools do have the resource officers there but we also had some district folks out at the different sites and everything was smooth this morning. We appreciate the support of Oconee County Sheriff Mike Crenshaw and the police departments in the municipalities for their continued support. We will continue to monitor everything as we go forward but we had a good morning and we are thankful that we are operating as normal at this point.” Hanvey says the school district practices active shooter situations each year, to prepare for an event like yesterday. “We do a lot of, we call ours Code Red Training, and we work with law enforcement to go out and they actually bring someone to act as an intruder. We monitor how the school adjusts, how they handle that plan, how long it takes them to get into a Code Red, and get the kids locked into the rooms and areas. We do those at each school every year. We start them in the fall, we don’t tell the schools when we are going to come in and do that so it is as real life as we can make it during the school day so that our students and staff are prepared for that. We have continued to discuss as we move forward more specific active shooter training with our teachers and staff. That gets a little complicated in that some of those programs teach to fight back and resist and not everybody is comfortable with that, so those are on going discussions that we are having within the district office, with our building administrators, and of course law enforcement as we try to move forward to make the schools as safe as possible.” Two students and a teacher were shot by a 14-year-old armed with a handgun on the playground of Townville Elementary yesterday. Officials report that 6-year-old Jacob Hall is listed in critical condition at Greenville Memorial Hospital after being shot in the leg. Another student was shot in the foot and a teacher was shot in the shoulder; both were treated and released from the hospital Wednesday evening. The 14-year-old boy accused of those shootings, also allegedly killed his father at home just a few miles away from the school. The teen remains in custody, awaiting a family court hearing on Friday. Townville Elementary School is closed for the rest of the week as authorities continue their investigation into the case.