A student was found with a gun at McComb High School on Wednesday, marking the second time this week school officials have discovered firearms on campus.
School resource officers acted on a tip about the weapon, confronted the student and confiscated the gun without incident, Superintendent Dr. Cederick Ellis said.
“Our security folks got a tip and they got the information and once they got the information they acted on it very swiftly and confiscated the weapon from the scholar,” he said. “That is the second one this week.”
An automated message notified parents about the situation.
Information about the student or the motives for bringing the gun wasn’t immediately available because school resource officers were talking to the student and still had to relay information from their interview to the central office, Ellis said.
“We don’t know if a kid just had it for protection, coming to and from school, or if the kid had it to use at school,” he said.
Ellis said Marcus Gatlin, who heads the school district’s police force, plans to meet with McComb Police Chief Juan Cloy to work on a plan to address the situation of youths in possession of firearms. He said school officials plan to hold a community meeting with parents after that, possibly next week.
“We will meet to see how we can come up with a plan to collaboratively curtail this situation because we know this is not a school district problem, this is a community problem,” Ellis said. “Once we get our plan together, that plan will be communicated to parents.”
Guns and youths have become a major issue for the city and its schools.
Two McComb students — a first-grader and a rising senior — were slain in off-campus incidents last school year. Suepects in both shootings are people who were either still school age or not far removed from it.
Pike County’s Youth Court Judge has vowed to “graduate to adulthood” any minor who commits a crime while in possession of a firearm.
The gun issue has affected Ellis himself. He returned to work Monday after the conclusion of a three-week suspension over an incident that involved a student with a gun in June.
The student, a member of the high school football team, accompanied coaches and players to Florida and reportedly obtained a gun.
Ellis wasn’t on the trip but various sources said the school board suspended him because he did not inform trustees about the incident.
Ellis said that while the gun problem is affecting city schools, it’s also rooted in the community, and he believes it will take residents, community leaders and school officials working together to fix it.
“We know if we can keep our city safe that will trickle down to our schools,” he said. “Schools are reflective of their society.”
While lamenting the frequent discovery of weapons on campus, Ellis credited two factors with making sure the incidents were resolved without anyone getting hurt — school resource officers who investigated tips and the students themselves for alerting officials of the situation.
“What we can say is we have a top-notch security team in the McComb School District. They have great relationships with the children and it’s those relationships they have with the children, the relationships they have with the community folk that allow things to get reported before something happens,” Ellis said. “Our students themselves want to be safe and they don’t want these things to happen in their schools and that is the reason they are reporting these things to our SROs.
“What we want is if they see something, say something. That keeps everybody safe.”
Ellis credited the school board with having the foresight years ago to add to the district’s security force with personnel who were certified law enforcement officers.
“We know what has happened in McComb and we’re not trying to turn a blind eye to that or a deaf ear to that,” he said. “It’s going to take the entire community to ensure that when our kids come to school they can get a high-quality education, they can love coming to school. Now that is being hijacked by weapons in our schools and we have to get ahead of all of that and we will.”
