MUSKEGON, Mich. — In a visit that’s a part of the Attorney General’s goal to learn the challenges public schools face when it comes to safety, Dana Nessel found herself Friday afternoon meeting with Muskegon Public Schools’ administrative staff.
Nessel’s constant visiting came after Oxford High School’s incident on November 30, 2021. It was a mass shooting that left four students dead and seven injured.
“My goal was to sort of figure out what can the state do to assist school districts so that we don’t have another Oxford,” Nessel said.
The open discussion, which had been previously planned, came just days after a fight broke out at the district’s middle school. A 17-year-old nonstudent had been seen with a firearm in his waistband.
A spokesperson for the Muskegon Police Department said there are two suspects who may be charged as a result of the incident. They later added that those charges will only be misdemeanor level offences, though the details of have not be released as a result of the active investigation.
The fight was something quickly brought up by Nessel, who later asked the department’s chief of police how the 17-year-old was able to obtain a firearm.
Muskegon Police Chief Timothy Kozal said the department does know, but wasn’t prepared to discuss it before the media.
During the discussion, Muskegon Public Schools Superintendent Matthew Cortez told Nessel that the entrances to their schools are secured and believes the district is in a good position.
“I just think that we're very lucky as a district,” Cortez said. “Because we have to buy minutes, not chunks of time, if an emergency happens."
“We are blessed enough. We have an SRO in partnership with the police department at our high school, and we are working at putting an SRO in our middle school as well. The community policing that they do with the officers are building very strong relationships with our other buildings.”
Saying that his staff often goes through robust training, Cortez later spoke about the September 7 fight, saying that his team’s response was telling of their preparedness.
“They did exactly what we train to do,” Cortez said. “The end result was everybody went home that night.”
But there is still room for growth. The superintendent later got into the issues they encounter with communication, specifically with their analog radios.
“When we look at the radio system, we had buses that were there to pick students up and had a couple of students on buses -- our radios don't connect to the transportation radios,” Cortez said. “In the new system, that would all be connected, so that we could switch over and say, leave the area. And we'll call you back when we're ready. So that's like one of the areas that we saw, we really need to grow.”
When it comes to a direct line of communication with Muskegon Police, a department that utilizes an electronic radio system, only School Resource Officers (SROs) have that level of access, something Nessel questioned.
Other participants suggested that the district could find more ways to be proactive rather than reactive. There were suggestions of improved mental health care for students, though challenges of retaining talented staff hinder that option.
Nessel was upfront that she herself could not do much on her own, but said that she would work to be an advocate for public schools in sharing the many districts’ struggles up to the state legislature. She later told members of the media that the implementation of measures like safe storage and red flag laws could easily decrease the level of gun violence across the state.
“We’re not helpless. We don’t have to have mass shootings each and every day,” Nessel said. “There are things we can do to prevent it, and we’re just talking about reasonable restrictions that the vast majority of Michiganders would like to see implemented.”
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