After bomb threats were made at Ames High School last year and school shootings rocked the nation, AHS officials have decided to take action to make the school more secure.

Monitoring the people who enter the school is a top priority, said W. Ray Richardson, deputy superintendent of Ames Community Schools.

“Right now [the objective] is just that we control the access into the facility,” he said. “We’re going with the access cards, and there will be some new surveillance, and eventually we’ll have some motion detectors [to prevent break-ins].”

Although Richardson would not specify the type of surveillance the school would be using, AHS Student Advisory Council member Laura Ng said Principal Chuck Achter told the council that video cameras would be installed.

“He said the cameras would only be used in the hallways, not in the bathrooms,” said Ng, sophomore at AHS. “Some people were worried they would be in the bathrooms, but he said they wouldn’t be.”

Richardson also said all external doors are restricted. Staff members can enter through four of the school’s 38 doors, and students and visitors can enter only through the front door.

Students must show identification at the door, and all visitors’ names will be entered into a log, he said. There will not be police officers guarding the doors, however.

“We don’t have formal security people; we have our own staff who patrol our hallways and patrol our parking lots,” Richardson said.

Due to new locks on all lockers that can be opened with a master key, the school can access people’s lockers without their knowledge at any time, he said.

“The state legislature and federal laws across the country have given schools that right,” he said. “In that law, you just have to identify that sometime during the course of the year you will have spot checks, and that means you can do it at any time, and periodically we will do that.”

Richardson said the school officials also legally may look inside closed student backpacks whenever they want, but they probably only would in case of a bomb threat or similar situation.

He said school officials are not intending to keep students from storing belongings in school lockers.

“We just don’t want someone to bring in anything that will harm anyone,” he said. “We don’t want to just be rummaging through people’s stuff.”

Emily Nau, member of the AHS Student Advisory Council, thinks locker searches would not be an invasion of privacy if the school follows certain guidelines.

“I believe that with proper notification and the student present at the locker search, it’s OK,” said Nau, junior at AHS.

But Nau said administrators need to be careful to protect students’ rights.

“The courts have given the schools — because of the bomb threats — a lot of freedom to do as they please, but if the schools exercise the freedoms the court gave them, I think eventually the courts will have to go back on their decision,” she said.

Nau said though some security is a good thing, AHS must not go overboard.

“The school system needs to be careful to keep the schools as schools and not prisons,” she said. “They need to find a happy medium.”