The Roanoke school system is asking parents for suggestions on how to improve school safety. Officials will host two public meetings this week as part of a yearlong initiative to beef up the district's emergency plans.

In June, the Roanoke City Public Schools won a $630,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education devoted to security. That money is being used to train staff and bus drivers, to update bus radios, to put each school's emergency plan on a secure Web site accessible by first responders and to make the district's rapid notification system accessible to parents who don't speak English.

As part of the process, administrators want parents to share their thoughts at this week's meetings, which will be held Wednesday at Patrick Henry High School and Thursday at Addison Middle School.

"I am hoping that parents will be willing to participate and share what their perception is to identify where they feel there might be a need for improvement," said Asia Jones, assistant director of student services.

About $300,000 of the grant is also being used to hire a consulting firm, National School Safety and Security Services, to work with employees on emergency plans.

Kenneth Trump, the firm's president, is in Roanoke this week, meeting with school officials, principals, teachers and parents. He said he would look at "a lot of nuts and bolts sort of things from lockdowns to greeting strangers in buildings."

"Most school districts have emergency plans but because of the academic demands on school districts it's very easy for school safety to get pushed to the back burner not intentionally," he said.

Trump said his three-person team would return to Roanoke periodically until June to test the district's emergency plan and help train employees.

The Roanoke school system reported roughly 10,000 discipline incidents during the 2006-2007 academic year, the latest for which figures are available, more than twice as many as the previous year.

That does not necessarily mean the schools became less safe in the space of one year, because schools are responsible for reporting their own incidents, according to Charles Pyle, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Education.

"If a school division does a better job in one year than the previous year in reporting the data, that's going to have an impact," he said.

The definition of offenses that have to be reported to the state also change every year, which makes it very difficult to compare statistics from year to year.