Longtime teacher shares safety concerns at Hiram Johnson High School

(FOX40.COM) — Rick Redding Jr., a longtime teacher at Hiram Johnson High School , says incidents of students bringing weapons and drugs on campus are happening more often than not and he’d like to see the school and the Sacramento City Unified School District do more to prevent it.

Redding said he is a graduate of Hiram Johnson and that he has been a teacher there since 2006. His mother and father, aunts, uncles and cousins all graduated from there, as well.

“We have a very vested interest in what takes place not just in our neighborhood, but our school,” Redding said to FOX40.com in mid-May.

He says working there isn’t just a job for him. He loves the school, along with its students.

“Like myself, there are so many committed teachers on this campus, who really, really work hard and they deserve to have a safe place to work that is free of guns, knives, pepper spray, bullets, fights, violent fights where principals, administrators are being battered by having their eye socket damaged,” Redding said.

His last comment refers to a fight that happened earlier this school year where a student punched an administrator in the face, knocking him to the ground.

“The safety problems have been numerous and these aren’t just regular fights at school. These are batteries, aggravated batteries, teachers, a principal being hit in the eye… A good decent man.”

He said students bringing weapons on campus happens even more often.

FOX40.com received several internal reports documenting numerous incidents involving weapons and drugs on campus.

In this present school year, there have been at least four incidents of students bringing weapons onto the school grounds, three incidents involving multiple knives, and just last week, a gun carried around in a student’s backpack.

“I’m just saddened because the leadership in this district, on this campus, clearly doesn’t want to do anything. It seems to me, what are we doing here? Are we waiting for Columbine, are we waiting for Sandy Hook?” Redding said, referring to two of the deadliest mass shootings at schools in the United States.

FOX40.com reached out to the principal of Hiram Johnson and the school district to talk about campus safety.

The district asked if we could hold off from doing this report and offered us the chance to attend school in the morning to see for ourselves what safety measures are in place.

The offer was rescinded when we said our report was airing Wednesday night.

In a prepared statement, the district says, in part, “Hiram Johnson faces the same daily challenges as nearly every public high school in the greater Sacramento area when it comes to maintaining a safe learning atmosphere. The incidents you reference demonstrate that our strategies are working and that staff are preventing larger safety threats while maintaining transparency with families.”

Redding said district administrators may not be completely familiar with what teachers face every day.

“I think these are spoken by people who have not been in a classroom in a really, really long time. They’re out of touch, and that’s the crux of this problem,” he said.

On the issue of students bringing weapons on campus, Redding has his own recommendations.

“I’m not saying that we should kick these kids out of school. We should not be in the business of kicking kids out of school, but we should be finding alternative places for them to learn.”

“Every sporting event you go to today, they’ve got a clear plastic bag. Why can’t we implement something like that here?”

“Clear plastic bags. How about metal detectors? We are having so many problems and the things I’ve shared with you today, that is just a microcosm of the things that are really going on, on campus. We can do better.”

Redding said he would like to see the administration be more proactive and perhaps implement some of his ideas so that everyone on campus stays safe.

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