After stops at Morehouse Middle School, Carroll High School and Richwood Middle School, Orlando Freemont thought his path was cut out for him.
He would eventually end up as a Title I Supervisor for the Ouachita Parish School System.
“I was in a Title I school all the time, but God has a bigger plan,” Freemont said. “His plan is always bigger than ours.”
Freemont spent a good portion of his educational career as the principal at Richwood Middle School. He learned a lot about Title I, but he also learned a lot about safety.
“As principal, safety is the first priority,” Freemont said. “You wanted to make sure your students and staff were safe at all times. You learn safety protocols from tornado drills, lockdown drills, fire drills, you learn those things as a principal.”
Freemont became the Richwood Middle School principal in 2009 and throughout his time in administration, safety became more crucial as school shootings increased, among other dangers. As a result, training became more extensive and prepared him even more for his new role as the Director of Safety & Security for Ouachita Parish Schools System.
“Safety is not an event,” Freemont said. “It’s not a campaign. Safety is a way of life, and that’s what I’m trying to get everybody to understand. This is not something that we are going to do for three years, and then we’re going to go back to the way we did things.”
Freemont wants his tenure as Director of Safety & Security to be defined by situational awareness. Freemont is spending the summer meeting with every principal and stressing its importance before entering the new school year.
“The hardest thing about it is just the mindset of people,” Freemont said. “You can spend millions of dollars on a building to make it safe, but human error … just the way we do things. You can have a $500,000 door system, and if someone doesn’t have the mind to close it or put a brick in it to prop it open … so it’s really just getting everyone to understand doing things the safest way possible and being mindful of what you’re doing and mindful of your surroundings.”
Part of Freemont’s plan is everyone wearing ID badges. He wants faculty and students to be aware that there should be no one in a school building without some form of identification.
“Not taking for granted someone walking past you without a visitor’s pass on,” Freemont said. “You see people thinking, ‘Maybe they’re supposed to be here’. You have to say something. We are trying to create this culture when you see something, say something.”
Once construction is complete, every school will have a man trap, making only one entry point into the school. No visitor can get past the entry point without permission and a visitor’s badge. Most of the schools in the district already operate with man traps, but some are still under construction with completion expected before the start of the school year.
The Ouachita Parish School Board also voted earlier this summer to have cameras installed in every classroom across the district.
“I think it’s very critical,” Freemont said. “At some point, 2 or 3 years from now, we’re going to be saying, ‘How did we even teach without them?’ I think the cameras are going to be great for protecting the faculty and the staff, as well as the students. I think they’ll serve as a serious deterrent. I think when the kids know they’re being filmed, their behavior is better, and I think when the teachers know they’re being filmed, the instruction is better. I think overall it should be a good thing.”
Freemont added that the cameras will be IP cameras, so he can plug in the IP number to any computer and view what is going on from where he sits at the Central Office. If a serious incident were to occur, cameras will also help first responders and law enforcement save time by pinpointing exactly where the incident is occurring.
“With cameras in every classroom, you can pull it up and say the intruder is in Building B,” Freemont said. “So now all the time will be spent going to prevent whatever is happening in building B. The cameras will mitigate things.”
Another caveat to Freemont’s safety plan is hiring two retired police officers to do safety checks around the district. Each school will be checked regularly to make sure the safety protocol is being carried out on each campus.
THE FREEMONT FILE
1997 – Morehouse Middle School
1998-2005 – Carroll High School
2005-07 – Richwood Middle School, Administrative Assistant
2007-09 – Richwood Middle School, Assistant Principal
2009-22 – Richwood Middle School, Principal
2022 – Supervisor of Safety & Security
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