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Anderson County parents express concerns over student safety

Parents expressed concerns about school safety at a town hall meeting Thursday night at Anderson County High school.

Anderson County Schools parents, students and staff are pushing for better school safety following the shooting at a Florida high school.

Parents voiced their concerns to school leaders about keeping students safe, and a panel answered their questions at a town hall meeting Thursday night.

Though Parkland, Florida, is nearly 850 miles away, the school shooting that killed 17 people hit parents close to home.

"It scares me, it truly does," Anderson County Schools parent Donald Tackett said.

"I said, do you know anybody in the various schools that you go to, who you think might be close to potentially doing something ro who might be at risk for doing something like that, and out of 12 kids, 7 or 8 of them raised their hand," said parent Charles LaMaster.

ACS held the town hall meeting to calm any fears parents and students might have about security.

Superintendent Dr. Tim Parrott led the discussion.

"We may not have gotten to all the questions, but the biggest part of them we got to," Parrott said.

The panel of school administrators and law enforcement talked about upgrading the security cameras and tracking everything students are doing on their school-issued laptops.

"They realize that we do work together, the municipalities work together, the parents work together, we're all in this together for our students' safety," said Parrot.

Nearly 450 people filled the auditorium, including Lake City Middle School parent Donald Tackett.

"I believe they do as good of a job as they can, but it can always be fixed, it can always be done better," said Tackett.

But Tackett wasn't completely happy.

"I think he cherry picked the questions and all the questions that wanted to be asked were not asked," said Tackett.

Clinton High School parent Charles LaMaster was happy with the meeting.

"It's good that they had a meeting," he said. "This is the first meeting that I've been to, and there have been several other unfortunate incidents happening at school."

Parrot said he's going to answer every question that came in, whether it was through email or social media.

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