In the wake of the Newtown, Conn. school shootings, parents and Mineola Board of Education members engaged in a wide-ranging discussion of current and future security procedures at Mineola public schools at last Thursday night’s school board meeting.
Mineola Superintendent of Schools Michael Nagler said the district’s current security practices have been in place since the Columbine High School shootings took place in Littleton, Col. in 1999.
“Lock-down and lock-out drills we’ve been doing for years,” Nagler said.
Lock-down drills are used to simulate situations where an intruder is in a school building, he said, while lock-out drills simulate situations in which a threat is believed to exist outside the building. Nagler said those drills are conducted with Nassau County Police officers observing the procedures.
Nagler said security cameras are in place at all buildings and a district safety committee reviews security procedures in the schools each year. Nagler said the “most problematic” building to secure is the high school because the students leave and re-enter the school throughout the day. But, he said, the most frequent problems arise from adults visiting the schools.
“When procedures are ignored, it’s typically adults,” he said.
Security guards are posted in the high school and volunteers man the doors at the elementary schools to sign visitors in. But Nagler described the current school district security as a “passive system” with security cameras recording activity. He said security guards do not monitor the cameras.
“I think when you do that, it creates an entirely different atmosphere in the building,” he said, adding that it’s hard to prevent “crazy people from doing crazy things.”
District resident John Valente said entrance and exit from particular doors should be defined in each building. He said guards should be armed and provided with “lock boxes” they could enter for self-protection and suggested use of metal detectors be considered.
“There definitely should be guards. Cameras are absolutely worthless,” Valente said.
Board Vice President Terence Hale sharply disagreed with the idea of arming security guards, saying, “If a crazy wants to get in, it’s not going to stop anybody.”
Board Trustee Christine Napolitano said she opposed the idea of installing metal detectors.
“We’re looking at an incident and you have to compare it with millions of children going to school every day. I don’t want to scare our children,” she said.
Bill McIntosh, a Hampton Street parent who said he was a 16-year veteran of federal law enforcement, said guards in the schools are important “as a deterrent.” He suggested the school district seek retired law enforcement officers looking to supplement their income to serve as uniformed security guards in the high school and middle school and as plain clothes guards in the elementary schools.
“I don’t think we want to open the floodgates by allowing firearms in the schools,” McIntosh said.
He said the operative idea in a situation with an armed intruder as in the recent Sandy Hook Elementary shootings is “buying time” and “mitigating” the harm that may occur.
“We don’t want to be so reactionary that we bang the other side of the pendulum,” he said.
Mineola High School senior Conner Dunleavy said he thinks high school security guards should be armed with mace and tasers.
A parent of a Meadow Drive School student said she had seen every door of the school open in September.
“I’ve seen the doors open at Meadow Drive School too many times. We need to lock the doors,” she said.
Nagler said he had checked every door at Meadow Drive this week and found them all secured. But he said now isn’t the time to be checking.
“It’s three months from now when we forget about this atrocity and we look for convenience that we need to be aware,” Nagler said, adding that for every parent who tells him more security is needed, another parent tells them they want more open access to the schools.
He said he planned to conduct “surprise lock downs” at the schools in the next few months. He said some new security measures would not be evident and others would be obvious, all with the same objective.
“We want our kids safe,” Nagler said.
In other developments:
• Nagler reported that asphalt had been poured to complete construction of the bus lane on Saville Road on the west side of the Jackson Avenue School. The bus lane is intended to improve student safety by enabling students to board buses at dismissal time rather than cross Jackson Avenue in front of the school to board buses as they have previously done.
• A discussion about reducing the number of polling places from four locations to two or one location in next May’s election left the issue unresolved. Board Trustee Artie Barnett said the school district should try using one location while it can still use lever voting machines to gauge impact from traffic. He said costs of maintaining more than one location could become “restrictive” when the electronic voting machines are mandated in 2015.
Hale said he agreed with Barnett.
Napolitano disagreed, saying, “If we have to use school buildings, we’d have to use two buildings.”
Reach reporter Richard Tedesco by e-mail at rtedesco@theislandnow.com or by phone at 516.307.1045 x204. Also follow us on Twitter @theislandnow1 and Facebook at facebook.com/theislandnow.
