It was a headline Jill Lemond could be proud of: A 17-year-old student at a Nashville high school was arrested after a stolen gun was found in his backpack as he walked through the school’s weapon detection system.
Lemond, head of education for Evolv Technology, the company that installed that school’s weapon detection system, posted the news story on her professional LinkedIn page in April. The student was arrested, and the gun was confiscated before it could cause harm.
But the good news in Nashville comes amid controversy for Lemond, as she has had experience before with a student bringing a gun to school.
It happened in 2021, when she was an administrator at Oxford Community Schools, but the outcome was dramatically different. An Oxford High School student fired his weapon 33 times, killing four students and injuring seven others. The school had no weapons detection system at the time.
According to an independent investigation into the attack, Lemond, an assistant superintendent at the time, failed to be proactive in handling the student gunman, a responsibility she shared with five other school administrators and the school board.
The 2023 report by Guidepost Solutions specifically blamed Lemond for failing to help institute threat assessment policies in the district. Lemond, who was hired by Oxford schools as a language teacher, denied responsibility for the threat assessment policies to Guidepost investigators.
In July, Lemond is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at a school safety conference in Oregon, where she is to speak on emergency preparedness for schools. The focus of her remarks is unclear; a conference organizer declined to speak with The Detroit News about her appearance.
But the planned appearance itself has sparked criticism by some Oxford parents who are trying to have her removed as a speaker. They argue that her failures in the Oakland County district and the allegations of blame against her in an independent report make her unsuitable to serve as a school safety expert and that she is exploiting the tragedy.
Steve St. Juliana, whose 14-year-old daughter was killed in the mass shooting, told The News that Lemond is positioning herself as a school safety expert and using Oxford as a basis to do it without admitting her failures there.
“That’s what irritates me the most about it, is that total lack of acknowledgment of her failures and her wrongdoing, and yet she’s trying to use this as a professional basis, and it totally misrepresents the truth of what happened in Oxford,” St. Juliana said.
“She claims that she had no responsibility for the threat assessment process. However, that was patently false.”
Lemond did not respond to multiple attempts by The News for an interview or a statement for this story.
It is not unusual for former school employees who survived school shootings or were directly involved in responding to them to later speak nationally as keynote speakers on resilience, crisis leadership, trauma recovery, school safety and violence prevention.
But parents in Oxford say Lemond’s specific focus on school safety is different. Twice, they have sought to have her removed as a speaker at separate school safety conferences.
In 2023, pressure from Oxford families on organizers of the 2024 Midwest School Safety Summit in Lansing, an event organized by families and survivors from the Sandy Hook school massacre in Newton, Connecticut, led Lemond to withdraw as a speaker.
“We had success with the Sandy Hook (event). That gave us some validation that what we were thinking was correct,” said Oxford parent Renee Upham, a former Oxford Middle School teacher whose son was a junior at the high school at the time of the attack.
Kate Reynolds, an associate deputy director at Safe and Sound Schools, which hosted the 2024 Lansing event, confirmed Lemond’s withdrawal.
‘Oxford was prepared for our tragedy,’ Lemond says
Blogs, articles and interviews Lemond has given since the 2021 attack and since she left Oxford shed light on her career pivot focusing on school safety.
In an interview done on Sept. 2, 2022, while she remained employed in Oxford schools, Lemond told WXYZ-TV that the high school was on a positive path. It was nine months after the attack and a year before Guidepost released its report.
“The high school right now is in a great, on a great path to having a really successful future,” Lemond said in the interview. “We put in several new safety mechanisms and different programs and procedures, along with the training necessary, and I think we have the right people in the right positions to continue that important work.”
In that interview, Lemond went on to say that Oxford was prepared for the attack and that it was the right time for her to leave.
“Thank goodness, Oxford was prepared for our tragedy, and our students and our staff knew what to do, and safety has really been at the forefront of our conversations for over the last decade,” Lemond said.
“You know, I’ve been here for 12 years, and safety has always been at the beginning of budget conversations and budgeted for and really highly invested in, but I don’t think that’s common. And I really feel that I have an opportunity now to go and raise awareness in other schools to help make legislative change and potentially get more school funding for safety, and I think I need to take this opportunity, and it’s the right company for me to do that.”
A 2023 independent review by Guidepost Solutions found Lemond, Superintendent Tim Throne, Assistant Superintendent Denise Sweat, counselor Shawn Hopkins, Dean of Students Nicholas Ejak, Oxford High School Principal Steve Wolf and the Oxford school board had the most blame in failing to be proactive in handling the shooter before the mass shooting unfolded. None of the employees remain in the district.
Guidepost put the most blame for the failure to have threat assessment guidelines on Throne. According to Guidepost investigators, Lemond denied responsibility for the threat assessment policies despite Throne telling Guidepost Solutions that she was involved in them.
“In fact, Lemond claimed that she was not responsible for threat assessment even though she prepared a grant application on threat assessments in the spring of 2021,” investigators wrote in their 2023 report.
In the Guidepost report, which was funded by the Oxford school board, some school staff praised Lemond’s leadership.
“District and OHS staff differed in their opinions of the District leadership’s response and support in the aftermath of the shooting,” the report stated. “Many praised Jill Lemond’s leadership and work in serving as a liaison with law enforcement and communicating to staff after the shooting.”
Since leaving Oxford in 2022, Lemond has worked for Evolv, the company that provided the weapons-detection systems installed at Oxford High School after the shooting and while Lemond worked there.
She was Evolv’s director of education in 2022 and then became a vice president of education in 2024. Evolv officials did not respond to The News’ requests for comment.
Ex-Oxford leader says: ‘Well, we didn’t know this kid very well, did we?’
Lemond wrote a blog on May 6 for Evolv about practical considerations when approaching school safety. It included a section on engaging with the community.
“Districts that have successfully strengthened their safety posture proactively engage with their communities to explain their decisions and answer hard questions,” Lemond wrote. “They also invite community members to express their perspectives. That openness helps people understand what safety measures do and how they fit into a broader plan.”
Lemond hosted a webinar for Evolv called “Weapons Detection in K–12: Building Trust Through Proactive School Safety” and mentioned the shooting in Oxford. The date of the webinar was not clear.
“Just for a little background, I am someone who experienced a school shooting as a district-level administrator, in Michigan in 2021, and we had four students that were taken from us,” Lemond said. “And the level of denial when I’m out speaking with others about this, other leaders to say, ‘Oh, yeah, that happened to you, but that can’t happen here.’ I mean, that’s a really dangerous mindset to have as a leader these days.
“I think we’re seeing it can happen and does happen anywhere, everywhere, you know, all types of communities. There really isn’t a profile of what types of communities this is happening in.
“There, in my case, we had a pretty small district, a single high school district, and we would say, ‘Well, we know all of our kids.’ Well, we didn’t know this kid very well, did we? And not as well as we thought. Right?”
During the webinar, Lemond said she has experienced pushback from superintendents and chief operating officers across the country who said they are concerned about rolling out weapon screening because people will think the district has a problem.
“And, again, that sort of goes to what we’re just talking about, which is we all have a problem. It’s a national, you know, access to weapons problem in our schools,” Lemond said.
Parents seek to block Lemond’s appearance in Oregon
Oxford parents’ most recent objection to Lemond’s speaking engagements involves the event planned for July 6 in Oregon, where promotional materials tout Lemond, the keynote speaker, as a champion of keeping school communities safer and keeping guns out of schools.
“Emergency preparedness is truly a matter of life and death, and our families and staff deserve safe schools,” Lemond’s introduction reads in the promotional materials for the upcoming Oregon School Resource Officers Association’s 2026 School Safety Conference.
“Jill Lemond is a proud leader on the Evolv Technology team. In the wake of a tragic school shooting in Michigan, Jill realized she wanted to impact change on a broader scale. Lemond joined Evolv because of their clear mission to keep weapons out of our schools,” according to the association’s Facebook post about the upcoming event.
The post said Lemond has “extensive” school safety training and certifications, but does not identify them. It added that she is an active member of the Bureau Consortium, a violence-prevention training organization staffed by retired FBI agents, and serves on the advisory council for ZeroNow, a national nonprofit think tank dedicated to ending school violence.
“Jill is dedicated to the mission of keeping our school communities safer. She strives to see the big picture while always returning the focus to students and learning,” the post said.
Lemond’s known work and training credentials include an undergraduate degree in English and secondary education from Michigan State University and a master’s degree from Capella University.
She was hired by Oxford schools in 2010 as an English-as-a-second-language teacher. Her work in safety and security began in 2019, when she coordinated a state-mandated critical building assessment that reviewed the detailed physical aspects of building safety and related processes and procedures.
Oxford parents opposed to her Oregon appearance said they have asked her to step down as speaker and asked the event organizer to remove her.
“It was pretty apparent her role in this (Oxford attack) was not anything that should give her the ability to speak on safety and schools,” said Upham, the Oxford parent. “We want her to stop. She is exploiting this event professionally. I think it’s really disgraceful for the families who’ve lost their kids.”
St. Juliana, Upham and Oxford parents Danielle Krozek and Marisa Prince have asked the Oregon event organizer, Mike Jackson, to pull Lemond.
St. Juliana said he spoke to Jackson over the phone earlier this year and was told Lemond would be kept as a speaker after a review of his concerns and the concerns of others in Oxford.
Jackson did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The News.
Krozek said she has submitted a proposed alternative panel of Oxford Parent Advocacy members to Jackson to replace Lemond. The group includes parents, community members, students and others affected by the attack. Krozek’s daughter was a freshman in school on the day of the attack.
Prince emailed Jackson last month, urging him to reconsider his choice.
“It is deeply offensive to the victims here when she is presented as a school safety expert,” Prince wrote in an April 19 email. “Her failure to properly do her job led to a massacre that our community will never fully recover from. Oxford continues to face division and cope with pain and anger, myself included. The Oregon SRO Association’s decision to give her a platform adds to that pain.”
The parents have also asked Lemond to step down from the event, sending her a letter and a letter to her bosses at Evolv, signed “Oxford parents and students,” asking her to stop speaking at conferences.
‘Organizations need to vet their speakers,’ expert says
Kenneth Trump, a Cleveland-based national school security expert, said the Guidepost report on Oxford was one of the first after-action reports for a mass school shooting he has seen that included by-name criticism of school administrators.
“And especially in an after-action report that was commissioned, paid for by the school district that experienced the incident,” Trump said.
Lemond was named in the document 58 times.
Trump said keynote session leaders should have extensive education, training and experience as well as stories to tell about school safety.
“I have never heard of such an aggressive action on behalf of the parents to stop this, but it’s certainly understandable why they’re doing so,” Trump said. “The associations need to vet their speakers, look at their education, training and experience in the field and have some ethical boundaries.”
State probe into shooting still underway
No Oxford school officials have been criminally charged in the deaths of the victims or those injured. The student gunman and his parents are serving time in prison for their criminal roles in the attack.
The Guidepost report found that people at every level of the school district failed to provide a safe and secure environment for students. The investigators found no “intention, or callousness, or wanton indifference,” but did note failure and responsibility by omission.
In 2024, Attorney General Dana Nessel launched a state-level investigation into the shooting after demands from parents of victims intensified.
In early May, Nessel spokeswoman Kim Bush said her office received requested documentation from the school board in March.
“Our review remains ongoing, and I cannot provide an estimated completion timeline at this time,” Bush told The News in an email.
St. Juliana said he has nothing personal against Lemond and has not spoken to her. But when he saw Lemond listed as a speaker from Oxford, for a second time, he said he needed to take action.
“I’m just like, enough already,” St. Juliana said. “I’ve just had enough of the fact of people being able to not only move on with no repercussions, but this type of thing, where they’re actually using it to build their professional careers with no accountability. I’m just … I’ve had enough.”
jchambers@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Faulted in Oxford shooting response, administrator now speaks as safety expert
Reporting by Jennifer Chambers, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Jennifer Chambers, The Detroit News | USA TODAY Network
