Firearm recovered at northwest Las Vegas elementary school

Clark County School District Police recovered a firearm at a northwest valley elementary school on Friday, according to a statement sent to parents by the school’s principal.

Police recovered the firearm at Bilbray Elementary School after staff received reports of a possible weapon on campus, Principal Vanessa Altfas said in a statement Friday night. There were no injuries and no threats to the school, according to Altfas.

The principal said in her statement she was unable to discuss specifics, but Jeremiah Mackay, whose son attends second grade at Bilbray, said he was told by CCSD Police that the weapon was brought to school by a student.

After receiving a call from the district Friday afternoon about the incident, Mackay called it nerve-wracking to be a parent in the current environment. The incident has left him wondering whether he should send his child back to school or if he should homeschool him moving forward.

On the heels of a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that claimed the lives of 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School earlier this year, Mackay said he and other concerned parents went to Bilbray to question school leaders about what preventative steps were being taken to ensure their children’s safety.

They were assured that the school did have a plan in place but that the school was unable to share the details with parents so as not to compromise any safety measures.

“As long as they had some sort of procedure, some sort of plan…I was okay with that,” he said.

In the wake of mounting criticism over the police response in Uvalde, officers from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and CCSD Police conducted an active assailant training at O’Roarke Elementary School over the summer that emphasized tactics officers could use to seek out a threat, as opposed to de-escalation tactics.

While he commended CCSD Police for locating the weapon at his child’s school on Friday, Mackay said that he was upset and disgusted with leaders across the state at their inaction on school safety.

“You hear all these stories going on throughout the country, throughout the world … never did I think it would hit home,” he said. “For something like this to happen at my own child’s school, it puts you in a place where you have to start speaking up and forcing our politicians to do more.”

In her statement, Altfas asked parents to discuss school safety with their children, and to report threats through the state’s anonymous SafeVoice reporting system, online at safevoicenv.org or by calling 1-833-216-SAFE (7233).

But Mackay said he was going to continue rallying parents and putting pressure on politicians to do more to keep students in Nevada safe, whether that was implementing metal detectors, clear backpacks or armed security at schools.

“Our voice is continuously being ignored,” he said. “I feel it’s about time that our children are prioritized.”

Contact Lorraine Longhi at 702-387-5298 or llonghi@reviewjournal.com. Follow her at @lolonghi on Twitter.