With the recent mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. in mind, safety protocols in Talawanda School district have undergone renewed scrutiny.

As is the case nation-wide, safety measures in schools have been evolving since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999.

School officials have been working to update protocols and crisis manuals to incorporate new tactics and lessons learned from past tragedies.

A system of locks, buzzers and surveillance will be used at Kramer Elementary, while the new high school’s security system can be controlled by smart phone technology.

At a recent press conference, Butler County Sheriff, Richard K. Jones, called for schools to hire retired police officers, many of whom possess master’s degrees, as substitute teachers.

This has yet to be decided upon by school administrators.

The Miami Student editorial board believes that the most effective short-term progress in school safety must be made on the local level.

We believe that a serious conversation about guns and school safety needs to be had at the national level, but that conversation will not lead to safer schools in the immediate future.

The necessary cultural and societal changes that must prevail in order to diminish the threat of similar tragedies will take years, if not decades to truly take place.

It would be beneficial for individual schools to look at how to protect their students, and specialize safety measurements to that particular school’s population, layout, area safety regulations and other necessary components.

This issue impacts the entire community and must be dealt with by the entire community. We can no longer look at mass shootings and say, “That will never happen here.” Instead, we must look at these tragedies and come up with ways to prevent them in the future.

This needs to take place at the local, state and national levels and it must be a serious conversation uninhibited by partisan politics.