POUGHKEEPSIE – Poughkeepsie students don’t feel very safe coming to school knowing that classmates were threatening to shoot up the school, school board student liaison Samuel Ward said Friday night.
Ward, a senior at Poughkeepsie High School was referencing a February 27 threat on social media in which a student published a “hit list” of students forcing the district to close for a few days as federal, state and local law enforcement investigated the threat.
The investigation led to the arrest of student Adrianna Wallace, 17, on the felony charge of making a terroristic threat along with a misdemeanor charge of making a punishable false written statement.
The school board was also criticized by Kim Popken, a teacher at Poughkeepsie Middle School and the union’s building representative. Popken told the board that she was teaching in the district at the time of the Columbine Massacre and recalls the district being one of the first to hire a school resource officer and now the district is one of the only ones that doesn’t have one. “We need more help to hire security guards to staff the middle school adequately. The potential might be to hire school resource officers for each building in the district.”
The board was briefed on security measures by Assistant Superintendent Dr. Kathleen Farrell and district Chief Emergency Officer Jerome Elting,.
Farrell said the district is in full compliance with state regulations regarding safety and security but additional measures can be taken to further ensure the safety of staff, students and visitors at district facilities.
Farrell indicated that initiatives like single entrance access to buildings are being considered to limit outside exposure to threats. Recognizing that the move might be rebuked by students and staff, he said that “security is not a matter of convenience.”
The district is also assessing the need to repair existing closed circuit cameras and upgrading the system in its entirety. A new two-way radio system is also being considered because the current system does not have all radios on the same frequency which has caused communication issues recently.
The position of school resource officer was met with different opinions at the meeting. Trustee Randall Johnson said that he would like to see retired State Troopers in the schools. Farrell said that in place of actual school resource officers, most security experts and insurance carriers recommend off-duty police officers or private security firms due to the training needed.
Trustee Ray Duncan embraced the idea of school resource officers because they are trained in communicating with the students. “You have a hard sell on me for off-duty police officers, but an SRO program I would support. I don’t want someone with the “cop-on-the-street” mentality in our schools.” Farrell concurred with Duncan’s assessment.
Elting told the board that when the school year started, they had “X” number of security guards. For a variety of reasons including medical leave, they now have “X Minus” security guards. Farrell, who is in charge of human resources for the district, said that a civil service exam for the position of security guard was given on March 3 and the resulting list of qualified individuals will be available in approximately eight weeks at which time the district will begin the hiring process.
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