ORANGE BEACH, Ala. – The time has come, Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon told the City Council on Tuesday, to make sure the school in this resort city is safer than ever before.

“It’s just a new day and we have to evaluate everything short of blowing the bridge up,” Kennon said. He also said safety of private and church preschools should be scrutinized for security measures as well.

The action is in the wake of last week’s elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn. To start the ball rolling, the council unanimously approved $15,000 of immediate help for boosting security at Orange Beach Elementary. Part of the new plan will include officers present for the entire school day.

“This is just a start and we realize more is coming,” Kennon said of the expenditure. “Next year we’re hoping the county will come through with security, but if they don’t, we need to do what we need to do to make sure it never happens at our school. I think I speak for everybody. We’ll spend what we need to spend.”

This week Kennon toured the school with Police Chief Billy Wilkins and Fire Chief Shane Phillips.

 “What we’ve done is we’ve looked at a lot of different ways to fortify, for lack of a better word, the schools as well as put together a plan for an emergency response of two minutes,” Kennon said. “So what we’re looking at now is we’ve updated the new cameras that can be reviewed from your telephone, from City Hall, police station, anywhere. Bryan Bodine with Coastal Security helped us with this.”

Another new system to be activated will give every staffer at the school an opportunity to summon help the second a threat is detected.

“We’re going to give all the teachers and employees a panic button and it will have a direct link to the police station and if that panic button goes off, every car knows to drop whatever they are doing and head straight to the school,” Kennon said. “It’s on a lanyard. They carry them with them all the time so hopefully less than a two-minute response is our goal.”

Wilkins said the buttons may also be placed in common areas around the school.

“We’re also exploring some strategic placement of maybe some panic buttons throughout the school that the school personnel could access,” he said. “With the lanyards on the panic buttons, all of those have the capability of coming straight to the police station so that would certainly be a help. It would also notify the principal and the staff at schools.”

After a tour of the school, Wilkins and staff identified some places where security could be improved immediately.

“There’s a lot of places that we could make some minor improvements that would be major improvements,” he said. “There’s a lot of places that maybe some major improvements need to be made that might be very difficult to make at this time.”

Wilkins praised the measures the school presently has in place and the work Principal Lori Brocato and her staff do regularly to keep security high.

“We already know they do a very good job of keeping the doors locked,” he said. “One thing from talking with her yesterday that they’ve already done a good job of is constantly practicing their lockdown drills prior to this happening.

“They went through a lockdown drill and they were just utterly amazed at how good the kids did. You don’t just do that by doing it today. You do it by practice. It’s very impressive what they’ve been doing on an ongoing basis.”

One improvement that needs to be made immediately is enclosing a breezeway that connects two of the campus buildings.

“So we want to look at how much that would cost us to enclose it and secure it,” Kennon said. “We’re looking at fortifying the doorways whether they be bulletproof glass, solid doors, we’re going to evaluate all the options and get a cost together for those.”

An increase in technology will include being able to access school security cameras remotely.

“Hopefully the cameras will be repaired at least to the principal’s office and the main office within a day or two,” Wilkins said. “We should be able to make the internet connection fairly quickly I hope. We should be able to monitor that like we did before at the police station and technology will also allow other people to view it from a smart phone.”

Brocato expressed her thanks for the city’s actions.

“On behalf of the staff and students I just want to say thank you for everything that you are doing to improve the safety in our school,” she said. “We have talked for two days over ways we can always improve but I want the children to feel safe at school.”