Cobb school board chairman responds to safety concerns

The chairman of the Cobb Board of Education responded to concerns from parents and students following a deadly school shooting in Georgia last week by saying the board and Cobb County School District “have doubled and tripled down on keeping your children and grandchildren safe” over the long term.

Republican Randy Scamihorn, who is up for re-election in November, said in a “Just the Facts” newsletter issued by the district that he’s heard from parents and students since four people were killed at Apalachee High School in Winder.

He reiterated that parents should visit the district’s Cobb Shield vertical devoted to safety issues, and that includes information about a tip line and the district’s public safety staff.

Scamihorn said the mother of high school twins wrote to ask “can we do something about treating schools so they do not seem like prisons?” 

A retired Cobb educator, Scamihorn replied that “we know some of our safety decisions are inconvenient. Some of my family members are teachers, and yes, I am required to check in just like everyone else. If we have to choose between convenience and keeping your children safer, we choose safety every time.”

In his newsletter, Scamihorn didn’t reference an incident this week that led to criminal charges against a Dickerson Middle School student for making threatening statements toward another student.

The district said the student is not considered a threat to the school, and that’s one of more than 50 reported incidents that have “not been proven to be actual threats to a Cobb school.”

Nor did Scamihorn indicate if the school board, which meets next week, would take up a proposal by colleague Tre’ Hutchins to implement further safety measures.

They include implementing a School Support Officers program of non-post certified personnel to assist the district’s 81-member police force, and asking for technological assistance for detecting weapons at schools and at events, games and other functions in the district.

Hutchins also is asking for a financial analysis of those three items.

He proposed those measures following the shootings of former students at the McEachern High School parking lot in February (and a stabbing incident at Sprayberry in March), but couldn’t get a discussion placed on the board meeting agenda. 

That’s because board policy requires either the superintendent, chairman or a four-member board majority to add agenda items. 

Earlier this week, Heather Tolley-Bauer of Watching the Funds-Cobb, a school watchdog group, said the policy “is the worst example of representative democracy that you will ever see. . . . We are talking about enhancing the safety and security of our schools and they want to call us the activists?”

At the end of his newsletter Friday, Scamihorn countered critics who “have argued for ‘defunding the police,’ taking guns out of school police officers’ hands, moving money from safety to other areas of interest, blaming community crime on the schools, criticized safety drills, and fought against money spent on the crisis response system in our schools.

“Instead, the School Board and Superintendent have doubled and tripled down on keeping your children and grandchildren safe. Because of these and other safety investments we have made, the ‘feeling’ our students and parents have is one of security, not fear.”

The board will hold a work session next Thursday afternoon and a voting meeting Thursday night but agendas have not been published. 

• Dickerson MS student facing criminal charges for threats
• Walton, Wheeler students headline initial 2025 National Merit semifinalists
• Tritt ES staff member hospitalized after HVAC fire
• Cobb teachers train on virtual STEM prisms tool 
• Here’s what you didn’t hear about Cobb school book removals

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