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Natrona County Schools Examine Student Safety Policies After Incident

Park Elementary School via Facebook

The Natrona County School District is looking at student safety protocols after a man allegedly exposed himself to a third-grader walking home from school last week.

The girl’s mother, Amanda Huckabay, says the Casper Police Department had previously warned Park Elementary School’s principal about a possible predator in the neighborhood, but that information was not passed on to parents.

“The first responsibility of educators, beyond educating is to keep children safe,” Huckabay says.

If she had been notified, Huckabay says she wouldn’t have allowed her 9-year-old daughter walk home from school. She doesn’t blame the principal, but wants policies to be strengthened or clarified so that schools always warn parents in the future. 

“It’s hard to know what the right thing is to do sometimes that will satisfy the most people,” says Huckabay. “If you have a policy in place, then there’s no discretion whatsoever. You do your job and if anyone has frustration with that, there’s really no argument, because that’s a policy, it’s a regulation, it’s a procedure.”

The incident happened four blocks from Park Elementary on April 18. Huckabay’s daughter ran home and described the perpetrator to her mother and police. Later that day, she identified Brenden Day, 20, in a police lineup. Day was arrested and charged with indecent exposure.

When Huckabay went to her daughter’s school the next day, she says Principal Dawn DeWald acknowledged she’d known there was a predator loitering in the area.

Huckabay says school district policies should require the school to pass that information along to parents. She told board members that at a Natrona County school board meeting this week.

School board officials say school principal DeWald may have contacted by police, but the district was never notified directly.

Park Elementary School and the Casper Police Department could not be reached for comment.

Huckabay says her daughter is shaken, but proud of what she did.

“Because of her attention to detail and her ability to remain calm, it’s likely that she did save other children from possible abduction,” Huckabay says. 

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