LA GRANDE — Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s allocation of $3.3 million for school safety support and violence prevention throughout Oregon was welcome news to InterMountain Education Service District Superintendent Mark Mulvihill.

Each of Oregon’s 19 regional education service districts, including Mulvihill’s InterMountain ESD, will be able to hire a full-time specialist to oversee school safety and prevention programs with new federal funds.

“This is something that legislatively we’ve asked for, for a couple sessions. At InterMountain, we’ve done a lot with school security like hosting the summit,” Mulvihill said. “We also have a suicide prevention specialist that does a super job for us. Anything we can do for funding that can then add staffing to work with families, kids and districts is a good thing.”

Mulvihill said the original vision several years ago was focused on active shooter scenarios and, at the time, the position might have been staffed by someone retired from law enforcement or an individual with a law enforcement background. But through the years that focus has changed.

“It’s morphed now into the preventative piece, a mental health piece,” he said. “We of course have the Safe Oregon tip line that we piloted here and the safety summit that could be an annual event. That could be something that we do visitations to the (school) sites.”

The funding for the new positions comes from the federal Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund, which was reserved for allocations by governors through the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act.

In a news release, Brown said the specialists would support education service districts — which provide programs and services for the state’s 196 school districts — by building up programs to prevent violence, bullying and harassment, and to promote student mental health.

“Every student in Oregon deserves to be safe from gun violence. Every parent should be able to send their child to school knowing they will come home safe. Every teacher and school employee should be able to go to work without fear for their safety or that of the students under their care,” Brown wrote.

Mulvihill said school safety is “comprehensive” and the new position will work with existing staff members.

“We’ll just pull this together as a team and it’ll just add more people to get out there,” he said. “I always say, ‘We need more adults for more kids.’ And so that’s kinda what we’ll do with this as well.”

InterMountain ESD, Mulvihill said, will take a holistic look at safety to figure out what needs the service district has.

“There’s an active shooter component. There’s a mental health component. We’ll look at this comprehensively and think, figure out where are we in need and add this person into that,” he said.

The InterMountain Education Service District has more than 235 employees who serve nearly 23,000 students in 18 component school districts in four counties — Morrow, Umatilla, Union and Baker.

“School safety is No. 1, and we really work hard at it,” Mulvihill said. “It’s one of those things when every single day you have school and nothing happens, you kinda take that for granted. Our staff has really, really worked hard on this. I remember at the beginning of my career to where I am now, and having people that know this stuff like this, it’s just a real positive for us to move forward.”