GUILDERLAND — The latest school shooting — on Nov. 30 at Oxford High School in Michigan — was the backdrop for Guilderland to update its school board and community on the district’s safety procedures.

Ethan Crumbley, 15, has been charged with terrorism and first-degree murder of four students, and his parents have been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter.

At their meeting on Tuesday, Guilderland School Board members heard, in a letter, from parent Jennie Gliha, who wanted specific answers to 15 questions, ranging from where the district had bullet-proof barriers for children to hide behind to how often active-shooter drills are conducted.

Matthew Hanzalik, a Guilderland Police Officer, described the two-hour program he teaches to educate civilians, like school staff, on how to handle an active-shooter situation.

In short: Avoid, deny, defend.

“So instead of just locking down in a classroom, if you can get out and get away from that threat, that’s primarily what we want to do,” said Hanzalik, describing the first tactic, to avoid the active shooter.

Failing that, to deny a shooter, doors are barricaded to prevent entrance, he said.

Finally, Hanzalik said, “If it comes to the point where you had come face to face with the intruder, we want you to be able to defend yourself so you can go home safely.”

While Guilderland staff is being trained, the students are not. “The students will follow” what their teachers do, said Hanzalik.

Next up was Michael Laster, principal of Farnsworth Middle School.

On Tuesday, Laster had sent an email to “FMS Families,” noting that “threatening images drawn by a student” had been seen by a teacher and brought to the house principal. The student was removed from class and supervised by school officials until Guilderland Police arrived.

Then school officials and the officers met with the student’s parent, and “disciplinary consequences were recommended and implemented,” Laster reported.

The student’s images, he noted, “did not constitute a credible threat.”

The incident had echoes of what led to the shooting at Oxford High; Tim Throne, who heads the Oxford district, wrote in a letter to his community that, on the morning of Nov. 30, “a teacher observed concerning drawings” made by Crumbley.

Laster did not allude to the incident in his comments.

Rather, he explained that the State Education Department requires four lockdown drills each school year and that the school works with Guilderland Police as it plans procedures.

The most recent drill took 22 to 23 minutes, Laster said. Since the goal is under 15 minutes, the school will work on having spaces unlocked faster, he said.

The drills are announced ahead so as not to surprise stakeholders, Laster said. “We recognize the impact on the mental health,” he said.

Board President Seema Rivera asked if parents could be involved in deciding on safety protocols. “They’re all talking about it anyway,” she said. “It may alleviate some stress.”

Superintendent Marie Wiles said that would be difficult since plans need to be kept confidential. “That’s how we keep our children safe,” she said.

While the district is always open to feedback, Wiles said, “For the whole world to know … it’s really dangerous.”

While Guilderland High School staff has completed the two-part training, the school’s principal, Michael Piscitelli, said, “There is still a lot of discussion” with staff raising good questions and good concerns.

The most important change is that faculty now has options. Formerly, the only choice was to go into lockdown. Now teachers can choose something different, like having students leave the school, which Piscitelli said was “super powerful.”

The options, he said, have to be thought through before an event happens, and students have to follow their teacher’s lead.

School board member Rebecca Butterfield, a pediatrician, urged being mindful of the trauma that such drills instill.

The social-emotional well being of students was addressed by Lisa Knowles, the district’s director of pupil personnel services.

She noted that each of the district’s schools — the high school, the middle school, and five elementary schools — has a psychologist or social worker and some have both. Each school also has a response team.

This year, the district started using the Positivity Project, which is built on 24 character strengths and teaches skills like building positive relationships and cheering other’s successes, Knowles said.

Referencing the way the shooting unfolded at Oxford High School, board member Blanca Gonzalez-Parker asked if social workers were looking into psychological aspects of students and if staff had authority to search a backpack or locker.

Hanzalik responded that law enforcement can search for good reason.

“How do you decide?” asked Gonzalez-Parker. 

Every situation is different, Hanzalik said. “We do have plans in place,” he said, adding, “This isn’t the venue to discuss the nitty-gritty of what we do.”

School administrators have more latitude for searches than police but “need reasonable suspicion,” Piscitelli responded.

He also said that teachers were the school’s “front line,” constantly watching for anything concerning, whether academically or behaviorally.

Clifford Nooney, the district’s director of physical plant management, gave a history of safety features installed by the district as well as updating the board on current installations that are part of an ongoing capital project.

In 2015, he said, all buildings were given a double entrance so that visitors stay in a vestibule until they are admitted. All classrooms lock from the inside and the schools have extensive camera systems.

Exterior doors are on a software system that can be set to be locked or unlocked, Nooney said.

For the current capital project, displays, which are now dark, are being installed in every room, he said. The district’s new phone system and the displays are both part of the public-address system.

“Principals will have the ability to put short messages across the displays throughout the building,” said Nooney.

The displays in classrooms are located on walls opposite the corners where children would huddle during a lockdown so they can see the display. The same message on the display will be on the phone, he said.

“We’re going to have automated messaging so, if we go on a lockdown, Mr. Piscitelli could literally hit a button and have on his phone that will make an announcement …. He could communicate silently throughout the building,” said Nooney.

He expects the new system to be online by mid-January and called it “just another level of security.”

 

History of security at GCSD

Guilderland began a quarter-century-long discussion on school safety in 1997 when an intruder entered Pine Bush Elementary School. No harm was done. But it “sent a message that that can happen anywhere,” said Nancy Andress at the time. Andress, who has long since retired, headed the district’s Safe and Drug Free Schools Committee.

At that time, individual school cabinets made plans for security at each school. “Each building needed to look at its culture and develop recommendations,” said Andress. “Our committee never said, ‘Lock all doors.’” Most of Guilderland’s seven schools in the mid-1990s elected to leave their front doors open. “While instituting a process where there are visitor badges…none have opted to do video surveillance,” Andress said at the time.

In May of 1998, a seventh-grader at Farnsworth Middle School brought an empty automatic rifle clip to school. The Albany County Sheriff’s Department said he showed classmates the clip as proof he had a rifle, which he said he would use to shoot some teachers.

He was suspended from school for the year and he was charged with the juvenile equivalent of second-degree aggravated harassment, a misdemeanor; his case was handled in Albany County Family Court, which seals its records.

The student’s mother said officials had overreacted and filed a suit for $750,000 in federal district court. The student’s parents eventually settled with the sheriff’s department and the Guilderland School District. The court sealed the settlement papers and neither side would comment on their content.

The 1998 incident occurred at a time when guns at school had resulted in several tragedies and heightened awareness of youths threatening violence.

Of the dozen shooting deaths at schools nationwide that year, the most publicized case was in Janesboro, Arkansas where two boys, ages 11 and 13, were charged with fatally shooting four schoolmates and a teacher after setting off a false fire alarm.

In April of 1999, in the wake of the school killings at Columbine in Colorado, many districts rushed to beef up security, installing metal detectors and surveillance cameras and bringing in armed officers.

Blaise Salerno, who was Guilderland’s superintendent at the time, spoke to high-school students and the school board of the need for “the development of a caring community, one in which we look after each other.”

He assured students that “the position of the district was not to be punitive…but to supply appropriate help and support for anyone.”

Alluding to the fact that the two boys who caused the Columbine slaughter considered themselves outcasts, Salerno said it was the right of every individual to demonstrate difference and to be accepted.

“It is the differences between us that challenge us to be better than we are,” he said. Salerno concluded of schools, “Not only are they places of learning, but they are sanctuaries.”

The school board members supported the superintendent’s stance at their April 1999 meeting.

That May, two Guilderland Police officers were stationed in the schools — one in the middle school and one at the high school. Their role, the superintendent said at the time, was to serve as educators, not just as enforcers.

Several school board members pointed out that Columbine had an armed deputy sheriff on hand at the time of the killings. Several others raised questions about the officers’ carrying guns and it was decided at the time that the Guilderland officers would wear dressed-down uniforms, with their guns concealed in waist packs.

Guilderland now has a single school resource officer.

 

“Maximum possible felonies”

In 2000, under the leadership of a new superintendent, Gregory Aidala, a 12-year-old Farnsworth student was charged by Guilderland Police with first-degree falsely reporting an incident, a felony. He was arrested the day after another student had discovered the words  “Bomb! At 1:00” written on the wall of a boys’ bathroom.

Farnsworth’s nearly 1,400 students were herded into the school gym where they waited for two-and-a-half hours — while police with a bomb-sniffing dog and staff searched the school — until they received an all-clear signal.

Aidala issued a release saying the district would “exercise all legal avenues to assure that this act is punished with the maximum possible felonies.”

A law passed in 1999 had made it a felony to falsely report an incident if the person knew it “to be false or baseless and under circumstances in which it is likely public alarm or inconvenience will result…warning  of an impending occurrence of a fire, an explosion, or the release of a hazardous substance upon school grounds and it is likely that persons are present on said grounds.”

This began a spate of bomb threats at Farnsworth — including seven in the fall of 2002. The suspects faced felony charges.

That fall, parents turned out in force — over 200 of them — to find out more about the hoaxes. They learned that writing on school walls — this was before the advent of emails — had been interpreted by school officials as threats.

Asked why felony charges were made, Superintendent Aidala said, “We are angry and frustrated by the amount of time we spend dealing with these issues.” Asked if clearing the schools might not inspire copycat threats, with such a response giving the culprits tremendous power rather than just treating it like graffiti vandalism, Aidala said, “Once they see the consequences, we expect students will get the message — it’s a very serious situation.”

A state law that was new at the time allowed police departments to be paid for costs related to such incidents, if the suspect were convicted — up to $10,000 from an individual and up to $5,000 from the parents of a convicted child.

At the same time that Aidala said all bomb threats should be pursued “to the fullest extent of the law” — as felonies — the high school principal at the time, John Whipple, said, “You have to look at each situation separately…Until we find out who did it and why, I can’t say.”

The high school typically had one or two bomb threats a year, said Brian Forte in 2011 — he was the school resource officer at the time — after such a threat was made that October, written on the wall of a boys’ bathroom. He noted no actual bomb had ever been found after threats were made in Guilderland schools.

Such threats elicited a “shelter in place” response where the school’s doors were locked and no one was allowed in the driveways. All classrooms are locked in place while police officers patrol the common areas. Students continue instruction in their classrooms until it is determined the building is safe.

In 2016, two Guilderland HIgh School students, aged 15 and 16, were arrested for the bomb threats emailed to Guilderland high school administrators and charged with felonies; there were no bombs. The 16-year-old, on the autism spectrum, was tried as an adult and served three years of probation.

 

Board deeply divided on locked doors

In 2005, a subcommittee of Guilderland’s Safe and Drug Free Schools Committee came up with a proposal for locking the schools and putting a monitor in front of each to admit visitors.

The school board was deeply divided on whether to institute a locked-door policy at Guilderland’s five elementary schools. Parents backing the plan urged the board to “listen to the experts,” even stating that “any rational person must agree.”

A school board member at the time, Linda Bakst, her voice quavering with passion, remarked that the Department of Homeland Security had recommended duct tape and cellophane for protection, indicating that experts aren’t always to be believed.

Parents who opposed the plan questioned the reasons for the committee’s fear and the “paranoia” expressed in the report. “It’s a huge injustice to spend such a large sum of money on a statistically insignificant risk,” Jeanna Cornetti, an educator and Guilderland resident, told the board. The overwhelming majority of school violence, she said, is generated by students.

A school board member at the time, Peter Golden, proposed that, if a child were to be harmed by an intruder — an intruder who would have been kept out by a locked door — then one of the board members who voted against the locked doors would be required to inform the family of the tragedy.

Ultimately, in a split vote, the board decided to put monitors at the schools’ front doors and then re-evaluate before proceeding with locked doors.

 

After Sandy Hook

In December 2010, in the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Guilderland school leaders met with first responders from local fire, police, and emergency services to be sure Guilderland had a good plan to deter violence and deal with an emergency.

“I always say our first job is not teaching and learning; it’s safety,” the current superintendent, Marie Wiles, said at the time.

Wiles noted that what happened at Sandy Hook was not because of a failed safety system. The gunman shot his way through the glass in the locked front entrance, police say; he then shot the principal and other adults who rushed to prevent his rampage.

Wiles, who had recently returned from a trip to Guilderland’s sister school in China, said, “In China, every school had a gate, an armed guard, and a gatehouse….I certainly hope that is not the direction we go. Schools are the heart and soul of a community.”

In March of 2013, the New York State School Boards Association released a report, “Tending to Our Youth,” calling for access for students to mental-health resources to prevent further shootings.

“We cannot and should not turn our schools into fortresses,” the report quotes from the December 2012 Connecticut School Shooting Position Statement, issued after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and endorsed by more than 100 organizations representing over four million professionals, including teachers, principals, psychologist, social workers, and mental-health workers.

The position statement notes that hundreds of multiple casualty shootings occur in communities throughout the United States every year, although few of them are in schools. “Children are safer in schools than in almost any other place, including, for some, their own homes,” it says.

The statement also says, “In every mass shooting, we must consider two keys to prevention: (1) the presence of severe mental illness and/or (2) an intense interpersonal conflict that the person could not resolve or tolerate….Inclination to intensify security in schools should be reconsidered.”

The “Tending to Our Youth” report expanded on those themes, stating, “Building and maintaining relationships within and around the school community can help keep school violence from happening while fostering academic success…For students, trusting relationships with adults are critical to learning…School engagement is essential. Students who are involved in extracurricular activities, for example, feel more connected to school.”

 

“Balance our priorities”

By the fall of 2013, when Guilderland voters approved an $18 million bond issue for building upgrades, including improved safety measures — with schools reconfigured so that visitors enter protected vestibules where they show identification before gaining entrance to the school — the board was unanimous in supporting the plan.

A week before the bond vote, the board heard a presentation on school safety during which Wiles said that “a safe learning environment” was at the center of day-to-day life in the schools.

The presentation highlighted such measures as off-site video monitoring at the police department in case of an emergency, preparedness drills, installing locksets that let teachers lock doors from the inside, educating nurses on triage, increasing police presence around the district, and using police dogs to detect drugs in student lockers.

“We really are at the forefront of school safety,” said Lisa Patierne, then an assistant principal at the high school. As school shootings have increased, Patierne said, the federal government has “sounded the alarm” and is paying for training for school administrators like herself.

Safety procedures include such techniques as SPOT, which stands for Screening Persons by Observational Techniques, and is taught to Guilderland hall monitors.

“We have to balance our priorities,” said Patierne of keeping the schools safe and also having them be “warm, friendly, inviting places.”