Mesa Council, MPS discuss student safety with Mesa Police at special meeting

By Connor Van Ligten
Mail

The Mesa City Council and Mesa Public Schools Governing Board discussed student safety and well-being with the Mesa Police Department at a collaborative session Wednesday.

According to an MPS presentation shown at the meeting, held at the Ikeda Stage at Mesa Arts Center, one of the focus areas of this effort was the revised cell phone policy at the district. Arizona House Bill 2484 requires all public and charter schools to create and implement policies limiting students’ access to cell phones and personal electronic devices during the school day.

The law mandates that schools allow access to cell phones for emergencies, medical conditions and teacher-directed educational purposes, while also restricting access to social media over school networks.

The presentation states that K-8 students are not allowed to use their phones in any situation during school hours and are only permitted to use them before or after school. High school students can use their devices before or after school, during lunch in designated areas and during passing periods.

MPS Assistant Superintendent Monica Mesa said the early returns on the policy have been positive so far.

“It has been very successful in our schools. Our teachers have been going to public comment sections of board meetings to talk about it,” Mesa said. “They said it’s really helped their students be engaged since they don’t have this distraction anymore.”

On the subject of weapons detection, the presentation said no firearms were detected in the 2024-25 school year and zero so far in the current school year.

MPS Director of Student Safety and Security Allen Moore said the district uses weapons detectors at all high schools and junior high schools. The district also use vape sensors in secondary schools’ student bathrooms to detect if a student is vaping, due to complaints about students not feeling safe due to drug use in school bathrooms.

So far, Moore said that this system has been yielding positive results in numerous ways.

“The feedback that we’re getting from principals is that vaping is down. One of our junior high principals said that kids just don’t hang out in bathrooms anymore,” Moore said. “At our six major high schools, we have 100 recorded vape incidents so far this year and 72 of them were caught by vape sensors. The vape sensors also pick up yelling or screaming things that might be indicative of a fight, which alerts our camera monitors which then lets us send security to the bathrooms.”

Members of the Mesa Police Department also participated in the presentation to provide updates on the department’s partnership with MPS. Mesa PD uses school resource officers to help with security issues and threats at schools.

Mesa PD Cmdr. Stephanie Derivan highlighted a key policy change, being that mandatory reports for crimes such as sexual abuse, physical abuse or neglect cannot only go to the school resource officers — they must go in through dispatch.

“It’s no longer acceptable for somebody to come in and tell the school resource officer what’s happening,” Derivan said. “We now require that person to work with the school resource officer to report that directly to dispatch.”

Mesa Councilmember Julie Spilsbury asked for clarification on if this process applied differently for a student reporting it versus a teacher, and how that reporting process works now.

“If a student tells a teacher, the teacher can’t tell SRO? They have to call dispatch, but not necessarily the student?” Spilsbury asked.

Derivan clarified that either the student or the teacher can initially report the crime to an SRO, but must also directly report it to dispatch after.

“The way we’re doing that to bridge the gap is that the SRO will have you go to their office and you’ll call dispatch together,” Derivan clarified. “But it does have to come from that person directly to dispatch.”

MUSD — also known as Mesa Public Schools — is the largest public school district in Arizona and has six high schools, nine junior high schools, 55 elementary schools and 18 choice and success schools.