Good evening Members of the Board of Education,
Dr. Hamilton, (Mayor Pavia),
I am sure you are just as moved, outraged and upset
with the events that occurred in Newtown last month, right here in Fairfield
County. This tragic event has changed
our outlook and priorities forcing us to review our safety and security
position across the entire district. It
is unfortunate that an extreme situation such as this has moved this issue to
the forefront of our current discussions.
However, we have to remember that this event while incredibly tragic, was
virtually unstoppable. We need to take
into consideration the degree of preventability we can instill into our safety
and security procedures, and determine what is truly feasible that is going to
protect our students, teachers, staff, volunteers and administrators
Let’s remember, that this type of event is not
isolated to schools or CT; they have occurred in a shopping mall in Tucson AZ,
a movie Theatre in Aurora CO, and a College Campus in Blacksburg VA, as well as
others that are unfortunately too numerous to mention here.
First of all, I would like to thank Dr.
Hamilton for acting quickly and decisively for hiring security guards for our elementary
schools to begin immediately after the December Holiday Break. I am sure
she heard from multiple members of the community expressing the need for
heightened security on all campuses. I hope this quiets some of those
immediate concerns. This was originally
proposed as a temporary situation, and I assumed until a more strategic
approach could be formulated by this board, the police and other pertinent city
officials over the next few months.
Ken Trump – Pres National School Safety &
Security Services said after Sandy Hook” “Fast” does not equate to “best. We
do encourage school leaders to make informed, thoughtful decisions
when selecting school security.”
Now, we have seen Dr. Hamilton recommend these
positions become permanent in her 2013/2014 budget proposal. These positions will be permanently added to
the budget, a budget which just a few weeks before Newtown, I sat right here on
the Citizens Budget Advisory Committee and spent multiple hours going through
the budget line by line looking for any crevice of savings, any opportunity for
additional efficiency to put more money into the classroom. I walked away believing there was no
additional savings to be had without significantly impacting our staff’s
ability to teach our students. Now, with
a magnified spotlight on security we are proposing to just move a few items
around, and we were able to generate $600k to fund these “security” positions
next year, essentially removing valuable resources from the education line and
moving them to security.
I am very worried that if these positions are
permanent, we the taxpayers will be burdened with this role for years to come
without anyone even as much as doing a feasible study to determine is this
really effective? No one has even asked
the question of what problem we are trying to solve!! But adding additional non –educational permanent
staff now seems like a necessity?
I do believe by adding unarmed “security
guards” at the main entrance of our buildings will help standardize and
streamline the building access procedures across the district, as per Dr.
Hamiltons memo
to SPS Families on 1/17/13. It might
also ease the burden and responsibility of the administrative staff in each
building, freeing them to work on other tasks beyond monitoring the flow of
traffic through the building. But does
it make our schools any safer? Any more
secure?
What is the liability that we are asking the
city to take on if one of our schools is
targeted in the future and one of these unarmed security guards, perhaps we
should say a potential sitting duck, is left with confronting an armed intruder
more interested in shooting than talking?
The second question that arises, is what
screenings have these security guards gone through? These individuals
were seemingly unemployed on 12/31. Are
they qualified to work with children? Do they have sufficient mental
screening? How will their training correspond to the increased security
standards that Dr. Hamilton is implementing across every campus.
I am concerned that placing untrained,
unscreened, unfinger printed individuals, who may or may not be qualified to
work with children at the front door of our
buildings is much like the TSA screenings in
airports, that is only window
dressing to make us feel safer but does not actually address the issue of
actually making the schools safer. There are reams of video on YouTube that
show you how to get a gun onto a plane. Making
people feel safer is certainly half the battle, but there is no
guarantee that the person who is charged with this duty will be in the right
place at the right time, if god forbid any action is actually required. I
have asked friends from around the district to provide me feedback on their
security guards, and the comments were not kind to say the least. In lieu of time, I will email those comments
to you after this meeting
Placing unarmed security guards is not an
effective long term solution, which begs the question I asked earlier: WHAT
IS THE ISSUE WE ARE TRYING TO SOLVE HERE?
If, if, if safety and security are now on the fore front of our
priorities then we must ask ourselves what is going to make our schools, our
students, our teachers, our administrators more safe and secure
What we must do is address the real long term
concerns of our schools safety and security. We must invest in improved
systems that will provide real results, (adding bullet proof glass, reliable
video systems, sophisticated security systems that will lock down buildings
with one button, etc) that will add real long term value. Any person
(3rd party, teacher, or administrator) standing guard, armed or not, is just a
fixed cost that makes us feel better, but will not really prevent the next
tragedy.
Regardless of the outcome on this issue, we
must be cognizant of the fact that we don’t want to turn our buildings, our
institutions of learning into prison states, where parents who have always
provided their time to volunteer in the schools no longer feel welcome,
intimidated by tactics to keep bad guys out, but in fact driving away our
greatest resources away. I have heard
from a few people this weekend that some schools are cracking down even
further, implementing new procedures that bar parents from volunteering in the
room, and preventing them from attending class plays. Keeping parents away will not help our
schools. Involved parents make better
students. Turning parents away means disenfranchised Parents and less engaged
kids, and that is not a formula for success
Security is an attempt to try
to make the universe static so that we feel safe - Anne Wilson Schaef
